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Big bang theorists awarded Nobel prize for physics

11-10-2006 5:52am

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slade_x

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Big bang theorists scoop Nobel prize for physics

The 2006 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to John Mather and George Smoot for their contribution to the big bang theory of the origin of the universe.
The pair were honoured for "their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation", the jury said.
According to the big bang theory, the cosmos was formed from a cataclysmic explosion that happened about 13.7 billion years ago. The timescale and geometry are measurable by shockwaves called cosmic microwave background (CMB) that continues to wash over us.
Dubbed the “afterglow of creation", the CMB is the earliest light in the universe. It is a faint aura of primordial radiation that comes to us directly from the early universe, just 380,000 years after the big bang. While it is spread very uniformly in the sky, scientists have observed tiny variations in the temperature and polarisation of the radiation, which they believe will reveal vital details about the size, matter content, age, geometry and fate of our universe.
These variations are also believed to contain information about the earliest moments of the universe, when it was rapidly expanding faster than light in a dizzying process known as inflation.

Cosmological breakthrough

Mather, 60, is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and Smoot, 61, is a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, both in the US.
The pair worked with the COBE satellite launched by NASA in 1989, and the results of their research added weight to the big bang scenario, since...........

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