Today the Big Bang theory is accepted as scientific fact. That wasn't the case a half-century ago, when a young radio astronomer named Robert W. Wilson set out to do some simple measurements using ...

Robert Wilson: As a graduate student, my one cosmology course was taught by Sir Fred Hoyle, a British astronomer who was a proponent of the Big Bang’s biggest competitor, the steady state theory ...

In 1964 Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias of Bell Labs inadvertently discovered the cosmic microwave background -- photons left over from the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.

Another radio astronomer came to Bell Labs in 1962 with the same idea. Robert Wilson (b. 1936) had also used masers to amplify weak signals in mapping radio signals from the Milky Way.

The Holmdel Horn Antenna in Monmouth County, N.J., with its caretaker, Robert Wilson, a senior scientist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Mass. Where the Universe ...

Arno Penzias (right) and Robert Woodrow Wilson, who co-discovered the afterglow of the Big Bang. The Bell Lab employees, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery, are shown ...

In 1964, two young astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, ... Space and Astronomy Calendar: Never miss a rocket launch, meteor shower, eclipse or other 2025 event that’s out of this world.