Robert Woodrow Wilson

Robert Woodrow Wilson 1936-, American radio astronomer, b. Houston, Tex., Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 1962. In 1964 he and co-researcher Arno Penzias began monitoring radio waves in the Milky Way galaxy with a radio telescope and discovered cosmic background radiation. Their discovery has been used as evidence in support of the "big bang" theory that the universe was created by a giant explosion billions of years ago (see cosmology ). Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Peter Kapitza .

Wilson, RobertWoodrow (1936– )Americanphysicist. Using a sensitive horn antenna at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, originally developed for satellite communications, he and A. A.Penzias found a faint background noise emanating from all parts of the sky. They had discovered the cosmic microwave background, interpreted as energy left over from the Big Bang. Their discovery, published in 1965, earned Penzias and Wilson the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.