Two Americans Win the Nobel Prize in Physics
CHICAGO _ Two physicists who obtained a satellite picture of the infant universe a mere 389,000 years after its explosive birth some 13 billion years ago _ a feat most scientists thought would never be achieved _ have been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics.
Many consider their accomplishment the most important development in the field of cosmology, cementing the Big Bang theory as the best explanation for how the universe began, showing how stars and galaxies formed and providing scientists with a marvelous time machine for exploring the past and future of the cosmos.
For their measurement of cosmic background radiation _ the afterglow of the Big Bang _ John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and George Smoot of the University of California at Berkeley will share the $1.37 million prize at a ceremony Dec. 10 in Stockholm, Nobel officials announced Tuesday.
“The discovery literally opened the gate to the golden age of cosmology that we’re in,” said Michael Turner of the University of Chicago. “It’s a fantastic discovery that’s enabling us to learn about the universe, how old it is, its shape and its composition.”
The measurements of the microwave radiation were taken by the COBE satellite, which began returning spectacular results within hours after it was launched into Earth orbit in 1989. The information transformed cosmology from an art into a precise science, according to physicists.
“When I was in graduate school from 1988 to 1993 there was a certain pessimism that we would ever really nail down important features of the universe _ how big was it, what was it made of and so forth,” said California Institute of Technology cosmologist Sean Carroll. “Once the discovery was made it revolutionized the field. The confidence with which cosmologists these days say that we understand what the universe is made of and how it has evolved comes in large measure from the microwave background.”
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally stumbled on the cosmic radiation while testing powerful radio receivers for Bell Labs in 1964. They were looking for the source of static heard on early radios and found it was microwave radiation coming from space. They were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1978 for their discovery.
But further research languished until the sensitive COBE satellite was lofted into orbit, allowing detailed measurements that were impossible to make from Earth. The planet’s atmosphere absorbs most of the wispy background radiation, and the atmosphere also produces its own interfering radiation.
The instrument soon proved the “radiation really did come from the Big Bang. There is not a good alternative explanation,” Mather said in an interview with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which administers the awards. Because the radiation was found to exist throughout the universe, it had to be a relic of the energy produced after the Big Bang.
After the fiery blast of the Big Bang the intense heat began to cool, allowing elementary particles to form atoms, primarily hydrogen and helium. Though the infant universe seemed fairly uniform, with matter scattered evenly throughout, the satellite was able to measure slight variations in the temperature of the background radiation.
That indicated some areas had more matter than others. Over time, Smoot and Mather concluded, gravity would cause the denser regions to consolidate, forming the stars, planets and galaxies visible today.
The discovery solved the longstanding puzzle of how the structures in the universe came to be, and it paved the way for more recent discoveries of other mysterious phenomena such as dark matter, which is detectable only by its gravitational effect on galaxies, and dark energy, which appears to be driving the rapid acceleration of the universe’s expansion.
As renowned as the COBE discoveries have become, they almost didn’t happen. The satellite was scheduled to be launched on a space shuttle, but the Challenger disaster in 1986 put that plan on indefinite hold.
Smoot scrambled to find other launch vehicles, even appealing to the former Soviet Union for help. Eventually NASA reconsidered, he said, pulling out a mothballed Delta rocket for a launch vehicle.
As has become traditional for American Nobel winners, Mather and Smoot were awakened in the middle of the night by phone calls. Smoot said he was somewhat reluctant to believe he was a winner until he went to his computer and saw the announcement pop up.
“The feeling you get from getting the Nobel Prize is different from the feeling you get from making a discovery,” Smoot said at a news conference in California. “The Nobel Prize was just kind of like dessert.”
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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune.
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