Title: 	  	May 13, 1965 -- Day we "heard" the Big Bang
 
Date: 	  	Friday May 13, 2011
Time: 	  	12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Repeats: 	  	This event repeats every year.
Notes: 	  	May 13, 1965 -- Day we "heard" the Big Bang

By the second half of the 20th century, the Big Bang concept was alive and well, but it got a considerable boost in 1965, when two young radio astronomers stumbled across its afterglow.

In that year, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, of Bell Laboratories, discovered a source of irremovable static in a sensitive microwave antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey. Try as they might to get rid of possible sources of the noise -- and going so far as to scrape off the droppings from a nearby set of roosting pigeons -- it persisted from season to season.

Meanwhile, Robert Dicke and David Wilkinson at nearby Princeton University were haplessly trying to build an antenna to detect this very noise.

Finally, the four minds met, and Dicke and his group told an astonished Penzias and Wilson what the noise was: the microwave background of radiation that exists as a remnant of the Big Bang.

On May 13, Penzias and Wilson submitted their findings to the Astrophysical Journal and, though they didn't speculate much about the source of the noise in their paper, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery 13 years later.

Since then, the Cosmic Microwave Background, as it has become known, has been measured with great precision. In fact, you've probably observed it -- albeit unwittingly. The static "snow" that used to show up on TV screens after stations went off the air in the pre-cable era was made up of microwave background photons, some of which had their origin in the Big Bang.