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The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE)

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The Cosmic Microwave Background

Part of the book series: Astronomers' Universe ((ASTRONOM))

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Abstract

In 1977 Smoot and colleagues at Berkeley discovered that the motion of our Galaxy through space is 625 km/s, much larger than anyone had expected. Around the same time, Rubin and Bosma independently found evidence for “dark matter”, rediscovering a finding that Zwicky had made in 1933. In the late 1980s Geller and Huchra find the distribution of clusters of galaxies to be highly non-uniform, with great filaments and large voids. The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite was launched in 1989, and in 1990 it showed that the cosmic microwave background was a perfect blackbody. In 1992 COBE found the long-sought after fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, the seeds of the structure that we see in the Universe today. These two discoveries by COBE led to John Mather and George Smoot being awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics & Astronomy, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Rhodri Evans

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  1. Rhodri Evans
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Evans, R. (2015). The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). In: The Cosmic Microwave Background. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09928-6_4

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