Discovery of Cosmic Background Radiation

In 1965 Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson of Bell Laboratories were testing a sensitive horn antenna which was designed for detecting low levels of microwave radiation. They discovered a low level of microwave background "noise", like the low level of electrical noise which might produce "snow" on a television screen. After unsuccessful attempts to eliminate it, they pointed their antenna to another part of the sky to check whether the "noise" was coming from space, and got the same kind of signal. Being persuaded that the noise was in their instrument, they took other, more sophisticated steps to eliminate the noise, such as cooling their detector to low temperatures.

1965年，阿诺·A·彭齐斯和罗伯特·W·威尔逊在贝尔实验室测试了一台灵敏的喇叭天线，该天线设计用于探测微波辐射的低电平。他们发现了一种微波背景‘噪声’，类似于可能在电视屏幕上产生‘雪花’的低电平电气噪声。在 unsuccessful attempts to eliminate it 之后，他们将天线指向天空的另一部分，以检查‘噪声’是否来自空间，并得到了同样的信号。被说服噪声来自他们的仪器后，他们采取了其他更复杂的步骤来消除噪声，例如将探测器冷却到低温。

Finding no explanations for the origin of the noise, they finally concluded that it was indeed coming from space, but that it was the same from all directions. It was a distribution of microwave radiation which matched a blackbody curve for a radiator at about 2.7 Kelvins.

找不到噪声起源的解释，他们最终得出结论，这种噪声确实来自空间，但来自所有方向的强度相同。这是一种微波辐射分布，其曲线与约2.7开尔文温度下的黑体辐射曲线相吻合。

After all their efforts to eliminate the "noise" signal, they found that a group at Princeton had predicted that there would be a residual microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang and were planning an experiment to try to detect it. Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978 for their discovery.

在努力消除“噪声”信号之后，他们发现普林斯顿的一组研究人员曾预测，大爆炸后会留下残余的微波背景辐射，并计划进行实验来探测它。彭齐亚斯和威尔逊因这一发现于1978年获得诺贝尔奖。