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Cosmic background matches blackbody with deviations

JUN 01, 1979

Although last year’s Nobel prize in physics honored the discovery of the cosmic background radiation in 1965, since then, because the observations are so difficult to make (especially at high frequency), it has only been possible to show that the spectrum is approximately that of a 3‐K blackbody. Nevertheless, the evidence for a blackbody spectrum has been sufficiently compelling to convince most cosmologists that the Universe began with a big bang.

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Volume 32, Number 6

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