George Smoot, Blackbody, and Anisotropy
of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
· Resources with Additional
Information
'George Smoot, ... has been awarded the 2006
Nobel Prize for physics. He shares the award with John
C. Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The citation reads "for
their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave
background radiation." '1 Smoot
previously won the Ernest
Orlando Lawrence Award.
'Smoot has been an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab since 1974 and a UC Berkeley
physics professor since 1994. ...'1
Courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
In 1992, 'Smoot made an announcement that essentially silenced all the scientific
critics of the Big Bang theory and helped change the course of future investigations
into the origin and evolution of the universe. Smoot and his research team,
after analyzing hundreds of millions of precision measurements in the data
they’d gathered from an experiment aboard NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer
(COBE) satellite, had produced maps of the entire sky which showed “hot" and "cold" regions
with temperature differences of a hundred-thousandth of a degree. These temperature
fluctuations, produced when the universe was smaller than a single proton, were consistent with Big Bang predictions and are believed to be the primordial seeds from which grew our present universe.'1
' “I offer my congratulations to George Smoot and John Mather for their outstanding contributions to science ...” Secretary Bodman said. “The groundbreaking work of these two American scientists showed us how to look back in time to the very infancy of our universe, so we might better understand how it came to be, and where it is going. They began a scientific journey that we are still on today, one I am sure that will lead to more amazing discoveries in the future.” ...
“DOE takes particular pride in the contributions of George Smoot and our Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,” DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond L. Orbach said. “The DOE Office of Science supported Dr. Smoot’s research during the period in which he worked on the COBE experiment, and we continue to support him today. In addition, one of the principal instruments for the NASA COBE experiment used to make the discoveries was built at Berkeley Lab at facilities maintained by the Office of Science. This is an example of the scientific excellence that DOE supports.”'2
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Additional information about George F. Smoot, blackbody, and anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation is available in full text and on the Web.
Documents:
Detection
of Anisotropy in the Cosmic Blackbody Radiation,
Physical Review Letters; Vol. 39, Issue 14: 898-901, October
1977
Search
for Linear Polarization of the Cosmic Background Radiation, DOE
Technical Report, October 1978
Large-angular-scale
Anisotropy in the Cosmic Background Radiation, DOE Technical
Report, May 1980
Low
Frequency Measurement of the Spectrum of the Cosmic Background Radiation,
DOE Technical Report, June 1983
New
Measurements of the Cosmic Background Radiation Spectrum, DOE
Technical Report, December 1984
An
Analysis of Recent Measurements of the Temperature of the Cosmic
Microwave Background Radiation, DOE Technical Report,
July 1987
MAXIMA-1: A
Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy on Angular
Scales of 10' to 5 Degrees, DOE Technical Report,
June 2005
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COBE Sky Map
COBE Spacecraft
Courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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