Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

Dramaturgy Report by Erica Israel and Chirag Gupta

BACKGROUND by Lauren Gunderson

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 Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was the brain child of George Gamow,

Ralph Alpher and Hans Bethe. The three had a thought that there must be some remnant of the

initial start of the Univese, or the “Big Bang”. The Big Bang Theory states that the Universe

sprang into existence from what physicists call a “singularity” some 14 to 16 billion years ago. A

cube with a volume 10-99 centimeters fits a mass of 1/100,000 of a gram; it is from this amount

of mass that the Universe came into being, according to the Big Bang Theory. The Heisenberg

Uncertainty Principle allows

for this much matter to be

essentially created out of

nothing for as long as 10-43

seconds, which is exactly what

scientists calculate is the time

that it took for the Universe to

form rapidly from this

singularity. Through the

process of inflation that

Figure 1 Timeline of the Big Bang
occurred at faster than the

speed of light, this small amount of mass began to rapidly expand away from the singularity and

form the current Universe. This vast expansion was able to generate 1085 grams of mass through

the combination of what is known as matter and antimatter.

As a result of this massive and rapid expansion of space, small fluctations were left

behind along the outer edge of the Universe. When the Universe began to cool from its initial hot

and dense beginning, it left a remant of the radiation of this event as a heat signature. It is this

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 Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

heat signature that is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. The Cosmic

Microwave Background Radiation, occasionally abbreviated as CMBR, was first predicted by

Dr. George Gamow in his 1948 paper “The Origin of Chemical Elements”. What originally

started off as a project on the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis by Gamow, Alpher and Bethe soon

became the initial predictions

for the Cosmic Microwave

Background Radiation. Gamow,

Alpher and Bethe used a

mathematical model of an

expanding universe, derived

from Einstein’s general theory

of relativity and quantum

Figure 2 View of how a satellite looks back through the galaxies and time to the
physics, to delve further into beginning of the universe

how nuclear reactions would generate chemical elements when when the universe was in its

early stages. The results they arrived at matched the current predictions by astronomers on the

measurements of the abundances of elements. The three proposed that the universe must have

begun as a form of a “neutron fluid”, a mass made up of solely neutrons, which was the densest

kind of matter that they could come up with. This extreme density was necessary in order to halt

the formation of the elementary particles, protons and electrons, during the earliest stages of our

universe.

Unfortunately, the ideas for the existence of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Radiation were forgotten about until 1964 when two radio scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert

Wilson, at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, aimed their radio telescopes at

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 Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

the sky and made the first discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. At first,

Penzias and Wilson thought that the signal was merely unwanted noise and they attempted to

filter it out. They soon came to realize that this faint signal was indeed the Cosmic Microwave

Background Radiation and in 1978 the two were awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for

their discrovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. However, their Nobel Prize

was awarded with no mention of Gamow, Alpher and Bethe.

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is a form of thermal radiation that

uniformly surrounds the Universe forming an “edge.” As seen with a normal telescope, the night

sky appears dark; however, if a radio telescope is used, the same form of telescope used to

discorver the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, a faint glow can be detected in the

regions of the sky that would normally appear dark. This “glow” appears nearly uniformly in an

anisotropic manner, as discovered by 2006 Nobel Prize winners John C. Mather and George F.

Smoot. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation produces a blackbody spectrum with

slight fluctuations. No cosmogony model other than the Big Bang Theory is able to explain these

fluctations. It is because of this that most cosmologists accept the Big Bang model as the best

explanation of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

Further research of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation has been conducted at

Princeton University. It was there that the tempertaure of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Radiation was measured to be a very cool 2.7 degrees Kelvin. In 1989 the Cosmic Background

Explorer (COBE) satellite was launched to measure the intensity of the microwave background

itself. These measurements showed that there are slight fluctuations in temperature in certain

regions of the microwave background that differ by roughly 0.0034 degrees Kelvin.