This month of May marks the 50th anniversary of the writing of a letter to the editor which
appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, vol. 142 pp 419-421 (1965) with the
innocuous title
"A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s".
Penned by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories, it reports
on measurements of the sky's zenith noise temperature, using a 20 foot
horn antenna in New Jersey, being 3.5 degrees Kelvin higher than expected.
The letter, of course, is reporting on the discovery of the cosmic background
radiation (CBR) which fitted the model that the early universe, in the instant
immediately following the Big Bang, was hot, dense, opaque to radiation
and was in a state of thermal equilibrium.
That letter formed an historical turning point in the field of modern cosmology.
The discovery itself resulted in Penzias and Wilson receiving the 1978 Nobel Prize
for Physics.
Original letter here starting at bottom of the page -
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/f...pJ...142..419P
Another letter to the editor entitled
"Cosmic Background Radiation" by Dicke et. al interpreted the finding.
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/f...pJ...142..414D
The Journal itself was published in November 1965 and its cover paper
is a seminal article entitled
"The Black-Body Radiation Content of the Universe and the Formation of Galaxies"
by P. James Peebles which in turn cites the discovery of the CBR by Penzias and Wilson -
See
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1965ApJ...142.1317P
50th Anniversary - "A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s"
