“Cosmic Ripples” win Nobel Prize
By Christopher MooreJohn Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and George Smoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California were awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics for depicting the universe as it was 380,000 years after its birth in the Big Bang.
Mather and Smoot were the architects of NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which measured remnants of light from the Big Bang. The results of these measurements provide compelling evidence in favor of Big Bang Theory, and give a glimpse of what the universe looked like shortly after its inception.
More from MSNBC.com:
The measurements also revealed tiny ripples in the light’s intensity, representing “lumps” no more than 0.001 percent richer in matter than the space around them. From those humble origins arose massive galaxies and galactic superclusters hundreds of millions of light-years across.
Although there is still debate about what caused these ripples, Mather’s and Smoot’s data confirm that the origin of everything we know, including ourselves, is founded on the slightest irregularities in the primordial radiation.
Why where they awarded the prize? Our universe’s (and our own) origins are important, but more important is that for decades cosmologists have speculated as to the origin and growth of the universe with little to no experimental support. Mather and Smoot injected experimental data into the discussion, confirming a hotly contested theory and expanding our knowledge of the make-up of the universe. For this they will split $1.4 million dollars, receive a gold medal and a diploma, and be able to add one hell of a line to their resumes.
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