Robert Woodrow Wilson

Born on 10 January 1936 in Houston, Texas, Robert Woodrow Wilson is a Nobel Prize–winning astronomer who codiscovered the cosmic microwave background radiation. While attending graduate school at Caltech, Wilson began working at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory. There he worked on creating a galactic survey of the Milky Way. After earning his PhD in physics in 1962, he took a job at Bell Labs, where he collaborated with fellow radio astronomer Arno Penzias. While using an antenna to research radiation in gas clouds between stars, the two discovered the presence of a uniform background signal, which they determined to be a remnant of the Big Bang. For that discovery, Wilson and Penzias were awarded half the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics. Wilson and Penzias went on to focus on a number of topics in millimeter-wave astronomy, including the measurement of the Sun’s radiation in Earth’s atmosphere and the discovery of carbon monoxide and other molecules in interstellar gas clouds. Wilson became director of Bell’s radio physics research department in 1976, was awarded the Henry Draper Medal and the Herschel Medal in 1977, and became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1979. Since 1994 Wilson has served as senior scientist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (Photo credit: Victor R. Ruiz, CC BY 2.0 )

Date in History: 10 January 1936