Skip to main content Skip to Search Box
Listen
Email

Topic Pages contain an overview, definitions, biographies, related topics, images, plus links to relevant articles and other content provided by your library. Topic Page: Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

Definition: cosmic background radiation (microwave background, cosmic microwave radiation) from The Penguin Dictionary of Science

The almost ➤isotropic radiation that permeates the Universe. Its distribution with frequency corresponds to ➤black-body radiation with a temperature of 2.73 K. It is regarded as evidence for the ➤big bang theory.

Summary Article: cosmic microwave background radiation from The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Fig100
Image from: Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) This all-sky... in Astronomy Encyclopedia
Cite image Cite Image

Electromagnetic radiation remaining from the early development of the universe. It fills the known universe and can be detected from every direction in space. Its existence is physical corroboration of the Big Bang theory for the formation of the universe around 13.7 billion years ago. It has an overall background temperature of −270.4°C/−454.8°F (around 3°C above absolute zero).

CMBR was first detected in 1965 by US physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who in 1978 shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery.

In 1992 the US Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite detected very small changes in the strength of CMBR that are believed to mark the first stage in the formation of galaxies. George Smoot and John C Mather won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2006 for determining very small changes of temperature in the CMBR in different directions, known as anisotropy, using data collected by COBE.

In 2001, NASA launched the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has measured and mapped the temperature of the CMBR over the entire sky. Data from WMAP was published in 2012 and provided further direct physical evidence to support and update the standard model of cosmology.

In 2009, the European Space Agency launched the Planck spacecraft to map the CMBR over the whole sky with higher sensitivity and angular resolution than any of the previous missions.

© RM, 2016. All rights reserved.
"cosmic microwave background radiation." In The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, edited by Helicon. Helicon, 2016. https://search.credoreference.com/content/topic/cosmic_microwave_background_radiation
cosmic microwave background radiation. (2016). In Helicon (Ed.), The Hutchinson unabridged encyclopedia with atlas and weather guide. [Online]. Abington: Helicon. Available from: https://search.credoreference.com/content/topic/cosmic_microwave_background_radiation [Accessed 20 April 2018].
"cosmic microwave background radiation." The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, edited by Helicon, 1st edition, 2016. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/content/topic/cosmic_microwave_background_radiation. Accessed 20 Apr. 2018.

Related Credo Articles

Full text Article cosmic microwave background
Astronomy Encyclopedia

(CMB) Remnant radiation from the creation of the Universe. Early cosmologists predicted theoretically that the Universe originally began as a...

Full text Article cosmic background radiation
Encyclopedia of New Jersey

The Earth, and presumably the universe, are bathed in an ocean of radiation, which has the distribution of wavelengths characteristic of those...

Full text Article THE STRUCTURE AND END OF THE UNIVERSE
Handy Answer: The Handy Physics Answer Book

What makes up the universe? If you said stars and galaxies, gas clouds, black holes, photons, neutrinos, etc. you're only partially correct. Thes

See more from Credo