Nobel Prize in Physics : The Origin of the Universe and How it grew into Galaxies

Two American astronomers who uncovered evidence about the origin of the universe and how it grew into galaxies were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics today.

The researchers, John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, will split the prize of 10 million Swedish kroners, about $1.37 million.

Dr. Mather and Dr. Smoot led a team of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and technicians that built and launched the Cosmic Background Explorer, or Cobe, satellite in 1989 to study a haze of microwave radiation that is believed to be a remnant of the explosion that, according to the Big Bang theory, started the universe.

Cobe’s measurements of the temperature and distribution of the microwaves, including the detection of tantalizingly faint irregularities from which things like galaxies could have grown, were a resounding confirmation of the theory of a universe that was born in a terrific explosion of space and time 14 billion years ago and in which the ordinary matter that makes up stars and people is overwhelmed by some mysterious “dark matter.”

“What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe and its evolution,” Dr. Smoot said in a press conference about the results in 1992. About a map showing the splotchy seeds of galaxy formation, he famously said, “If you are religious, it is like looking at God.”

Today’s announcement delighted astronomers who had long anticipated a Nobel for the Cobe work. In the wake of that research wake came a wave of Big Bang theorizing and a series of balloon and satellite experiments to provide increasingly detailed data on the cosmic microwaves, including NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Project, or WMAP, which is still orbiting and beaming down data contributing to the emerging picture of a preposterous universe, full of dark energy pushing it apart, as well as dark matter.

James Peebles, a Princeton cosmologist, said, “Cobe was deeply important: those two measurements set cosmology on the track to our present well-based theory of the expanding universe.”

Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said the Cobe measurements had ushered in an era of “precision cosmology” that continues to this day. “This is likely to the first of a number of prizes in cosmology in this golden age we find ourselves in.”


By DENNIS OVERBYE