PRIDE CHEKERAWhilst distracted by this phenomenon, physicist Robert Dicke
and company were also struggling to gather such radio signals,
which they thought was the remnant of the Big Bang.
George Gamow had proposed that such afterglow is there, but
since it had travelled through space for such long time, it was
Doppler shifted that it must reach us as microwave.
Between the two teams, no one had read Gamow’s paper.
Penzias called Dicke at Princeton University and told him that
they had a problem of a strange persisting signal noise. Hearing
about this, Dicke turned to his colleagues and said, “...we have
been scooped.”
Fortunately, Penzias and Wilson had already gathered such
signals originating beyond our galaxy. In fact, they had gathered
radiation from the early moments of the universe. Penzias didn’t
know what was cosmic background radiation, he just came to
know about it when he read New York Times. That is the
afterglow of the cosmos, remnants left from the origins of the
universe.
It is radiation emitted 380 000 years after the instant of the Big
Bang when matter stabilized to its ground state due to drop in
temperature. When this radiation was emitted about 13Gyrs ago,
it was of very short wavelength and very high energy. But
because it takes billions of years to traverse in space, up until to
its detection, its wavelength had been Doppler shifted to such an