Timeline of cosmic microwave background astronomy
From Wikinfo
Timeline of cosmic microwave background astronomy
- 1934 - Richard Tolman shows that blackbody radiation in an expanding universe cools but remains thermal
- 1941 - Andrew McKellar uses the excitation of CN doublet lines to measure that the "effective temperature of space" is about 2.3 K
- 1946 - Robert Dicke predicts a microwave background radiation temperature of "less than" 20 K but later revised to 45 K (ref: Stephen G. Brush)
- 1946 - George Gamow calculates a temperature of 50 K (assuming a 3-billion year old Universe), commenting it ".. is in reasonable agreement with the actual temperature of interstellar space"
- 1948 - Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman re-estimate Gamow's estimate and together predict that a Big Bang universe will have a blackbody cosmic microwave background with temperature about 5 K
- 1949 - Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman re-re-estimate Gamow's estimate at 28 K
- 1953 - George Gamow estimates 7 K
- 1955 - Tigran Shmaonov finds excess microwave emission with a temperature of roughly 3 K
- 1960s - Robert Dicke re-estimates a MBR (microwave background radiation) temperature of 40 K
- 1964 - A. G. Doroshkevich and Igor Dmitrievich Novikov write an unnoticed paper suggesting microwave searches for the blackbody radiation predicted by Gamow, Alpher, and Herman
- 1965 - Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson, Bernie Burke, Robert Dicke, and James Peebles discover the cosmic microwave background radiation
- 1966 - Rainer Sachs and Arthur Wolfe theoretically predict microwave background fluctuation amplitudes created by gravitational potential variations between observers and the last scattering surface (see Integrated Sachs Wolfe effect)
- 1968 - Martin Rees and Dennis Sciama theoretically predict microwave background fluctuation amplitudes created by photons traversing time-dependent potential wells
- 1969 - R. A. Sunyaev and Yakov Zel'dovich study the inverse Compton scattering of microwave background photons by hot electrons
- 1990 - FIRAS measures the black body form of the CMB spectrum with exquisite precision
- 1990 - The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite shows that the microwave background has a nearly perfect blackbody spectrum and thereby strongly constrains the density of the intergalactic medium
- 1992 - The COBE satellite discovers anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background
- 1992 - DMR reveals the primary temperature anisotropy for the first time
- 2002 - Polarization discovered by DASI
- 2003 - the WMAP satellite produces a high resolution map of the cosmic microwave background
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Timeline_of_cosmic_microwave_background_astronomy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cosmic_microwave_background_astronomy, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
