Penzias, who died final week at age 90, co-discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation with Robert Wilson.
Robert Wilson (left) and Arno Penzias unexpectedly found the cosmic microwave background radiation with this horn-shaped antenna. Credit score: Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
The world of astronomy misplaced an enormous final Monday with the loss of life of Arno Penzias, who helped the outline the origin and evolution of the cosmos as we all know it. As a radio astronomer working at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1964, Penzias and his collaborator Robert Wilson detected a uniform radio “hum” over all the sky. That turned out to be the echo of the Big Bang, and in 1978 the pair shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his or her discovery, which confirmed the origin of the universe.
Penzias was born April 26, 1933, in Munich, the son of Jewish mother and father who had emigrated from Poland and ran a leather-based enterprise. When Penzias was 6, he and his brother have been transported out of Germany to England as a part of the Kindertransport evacuation course of, fleeing the Nazi regime. He subsequently attended Brooklyn Technical Excessive College, studied chemistry on the Metropolis Faculty of New York, served within the military as a radar officer, and commenced a analysis assistantship at Columbia College. He labored with the celebrated physicist Charles Townes, inventor of the maser, and by 1962 earned his PhD. in physics.
Penzias went to work at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey and simply two years later made the breakthrough discovery, together with Wilson. (I’ve had the privilege of attending to know Bob Wilson, spending time with him on the Starmus Pageant, and listening to about these days of discovery.)
For a few years Penzias continued on with a profitable and vital profession. However this breakthrough discovery could be the motion that set our understanding of cosmology into hardening concrete. Penzias was the recipient of many awards past the Nobel, and he loved a big and energetic household, following his marriage to Sherry Levit in 1996. He died in San Francisco, aged 90, on Jan. 22, 2024, and will likely be missed as one of many giants who helped us to know the universe we belong to.
David J. Eicher is Editor of Astronomy, creator of 26 books on science and historical past, and a board member of the Starmus Pageant and of Lowell Observatory.