Arno (Allan) Penzias

Astrophysicist, born in Munich, SE Germany. A refugee with his family from Nazi Germany, he studied at Colombia University, joining the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1961. In 1965 he and his colleague Robert Wilson, exploring the Milky Way with a radio telescope, discovered cosmic microwave background radiation - a discovery which has provided some of the strongest evidence for the ‘big bang’ theory for the origin of the universe. They shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978.

Arno Allan Penzias (born April 26, 1933) is an American physicist and a co-winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. Six months later his parents also left Germany, and the family moved to the garment district of New York City in 1940. He graduated Brooklyn Technical High School in 1951 and received a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1954.

He went on to work at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey where, with Robert Woodrow Wilson, he worked on ultra-sensitive cryogenic microwave receivers intended for radio astronomy observations. In 1964, on building their most sensitive antenna/receiver system, the pair encountered radio noise which they could not explain. They tried, and then rejected, the hypothesis that the radio noise emanated from New York City. After the pair removed the guano buildup, and the pigeons were shot (each physicist says the other ordered the deed), the noise remained. This was later identified as the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the radio remnant of the Big Bang.

Penzias and Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize, sharing it with Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (Kapitsa's work was unrelated to Penzias and Wilson's). The two had received the Henry Draper Medal the previous year.