October 5, 2006, Stockholm, Sweden--The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 jointly to John C. Mather, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD) and George F. Smoot, University of California (Berkeley, CA) "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".
The discovery was based on measurements made with the help of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite launched by NASA in 1989. The success of COBE was the outcome of prodigious team work involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather coordinated the entire process and also had primary responsibility for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. George Smoot had main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation.
The COBE results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the Universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE. These measurements also marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science. It was not long before it was followed up, for instance by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, which yielded even clearer images of the background radiation. Very soon the European Planck satellite will be launched in order to study the radiation in even greater detail.
COBE was launched using its own rocket on 18 November 1989. The first results were received after nine minutes of observations: COBE had registered a perfect blackbody spectrum. When the curve was later shown at an astronomy conference the results received a standing ovation.