The Antenna That Heard the Universe's First Light
TL;DR Summary
Two Bell Labs scientists spent about a year tracing a stubborn, omnidirectional hiss in their Holmdel Horn Antenna—scrubbing pigeons and repairing joints—only to recognize the signal as the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang, a finding that aligned with a Princeton group pursuing the same theoretical prediction.
- Two radio astronomers spent months trying to eliminate a faint hiss in their antenna, even scrubbing out pigeon droppings, before realising the noise they couldn’t get rid of was the afterglow of the early universe — the cosmic microwave background left behin Space Daily
- A slice of the static on an old untuned television was the afterglow of the Big Bang, which means millions of people spent decades staring at the oldest light in the universe without knowing it. Space Daily
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