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Harmonics in the Universe

8 December 2006
The Universe is not uniform, and indeed it never has been, even in its early youth just 300,000 years after the Big Bang. It is as Professor George Smoot predicted and proved through his research based on data from the COBE satellite. In recognition of his work, Professor Smoot has been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics. After receiving his award, he will be stopping over in Paris to give a public lecture.

Background noise


Penzias and Wilson in front of their new antenna.

Penzias and Wilson in front of their new antenna.

In 1965, American physicists Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias built a new antenna for Bell Laboratories designed to serve as a relay between Earth and the 1st communications satellites.
During their experiments, they discovered by accident a source of noise they could not explain that seemed to be coming from the sky.



In their efforts to resolve the mystery, they even went as far as cleaning pigeon droppings off the antenna, until they realized that the radiation was in fact coming from deep space.

This radiation, called the cosmic background radiation (CMB), is in fact the relic radiation from light waves emitted only 300,000 years after the Big Bang. In the 1970s, American astrophysicist and cosmologist George Smoot began studying this area more closely and submitted a project to NASA for a satellite designed to study it. The Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) was subsequently launched in 1989.

When the Universe rang


Before the COBE mission, scientists thought that the CMB was a universal thermal radiation field with a temperature of about 3°K, but this theory did not fit observations of the modern Universe.
Cobe data. Crédits : NASA

Cobe data. Crédits : NASA

After 2 years of observations and analyses, George Smoot and his team published a sky map dotted with strange pink and blue patches representing the tiniest temperature variations in the CMB, of the order of 1/100,000th of a degree.

Although very subtle, these variations support a model of the Universe that is no longer perfectly uniform and drive a mechanism of gravitational instability which, by causing matter to accrete, gradually leads to the formation of structures like galaxies.

Professor George Smoot.

Professor George Smoot.

This announcement in 1992, for which Professor Smoot is to receive the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics, was hailed unanimously by the international scientific community.

The results from COBE affirmed the current model of the Big Bang and the formation of the Universe, by showing that its expansion can only be explained by the presence of new components not previously accounted for.



COBE also brought cosmology into the realm of precision science and its results were spectacularly confirmed in 2003 by the U.S. WMAP satellite. Its mission will be continued in 2008 by Europe’s Planck satellite, set to probe the CMB in unprecedented detail.

The day after receiving his Nobel award in Stockholm, Professor Smoot will be in Paris hosted by CNES, the French national scientific research centre CNRS and the Palais de la Découverte, where he will be giving a public lecture on 14 December.

Lecture
"When the universe rang - Harmonics in the early Universe"
Professor George Smoot, 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics.
14 December 2006
19h00 – 20h00

Palais de la découverte
Avenue Franklin Roosevelt
75008 Paris


Register at CERN website or by e-mail indicating your surname, 1st name and number of persons wishing to attend. Entrance free, seating limited. Priority will go to those who have registered.



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