Wilson, Robert Woodrow (1936-…), is an American radio astronomer. He shared half of the 1978 Nobel Prize for physics with fellow American Arno Penzias for their discovery and study of cosmic microwave background radiation.
In the early 1960’s, while observing radio waves emitted by a ring of gas surrounding the Milky Way galaxy, Wilson noticed a uniform background static suggesting that there is a residue of heat energy in the universe corresponding to a temperature of about 3 K. One kelvin (K) equals one Celsius degree above absolute zero (–273.15 °C or –459.67 °F). Many scientists believe that this faint warmth is the result of the remaining background radiation resulting from the explosion in which the universe was created. See Cosmology (The big bang theory) .
Wilson was born on Jan. 10, 1936. He studied at Rice University in Houston and at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he obtained a doctorate in 1962. From 1963 to 1994, Wilson worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (then the research department of the Bell Telephone Company) at Holmdel, New Jersey. In 1994 he became senior scientist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
