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Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson

Two men wearing glasses stand side by side against a gradient background, dressed formally with one wearing a tie and pocket square.

Two Bell Labs radio astronomers who in 1964–65, while trying to eliminate noise from a horn antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey, found a faint microwave hiss coming from every direction in the sky. After ruling out pigeon droppings and equipment faults, they realised they were detecting the cooled afterglow of the Big Bang — the cosmic microwave background. They shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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