spacetoday.net: Astronomers win Nobel Prize

Posted: Tue, Oct 3, 2006, 8:29 AM ET (1229 GMT)
COBE spacecraft illustration (NASA)

Two American astronomers have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on a NASA mission that provided critical evidence supporting the Big Bang. John C. Mather of NASA'Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot of the University of California Berkeley will share the 2006 Nobel for their work on NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft, launched in 1989. COBE mapped the cosmic microwave background, the radiation signature of the Big Bang. Data from COBE provided key evidence to support the Big Bang model of the universe's formation, and also detected minute variations in the background that were the precursors to the first stars and galaxies. Mather was the project scientist for COBE while Smoot was the principal scientist for the instrument on the spacecraft that measured the background's anisotropy.