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Timeline of cosmic microwave background astronomy

Timeline of cosmic microwave background astronomy

1934 - Richard Tolman[?] shows that blackbody radiation in an expanding universe cools but remains thermal
1941 - Andrew McKellar[?] uses the excitation of CN doublet lines to measure that the "effective temperature of space" is about 2.3 K
1948 - George Gamow, Ralph Alpher[?], and Robert Herman[?] predict that a Big Bang universe will have a blackbody cosmic microwave background with temperature about 5 K
1955 - Tigran Shmaonov[?] finds excess microwave emission with a temperature of roughly 3 K
1964 - A. G. Doroshkevich[?] and Igor Novikov[?] write an unnoticed paper suggesting microwave searches for the blackbody radiation predicted by Gamow, Alpher, and Herman
1965 - Arno Penzias[?], Robert Wilson[?], Bernie Burke[?], Robert Dicke[?], and James Peebles[?] discover the cosmic microwave background radiation
1966 - Rainer Sachs[?] and Arthur Wolfe[?] theoretically predict microwave background fluctuation amplitudes created by gravitational potential[?] variations between observers and the last scattering surface (see Integrated Sachs Wolfe effect)
1968 - Martin Rees[?] and Dennis Sciama[?] theoretically predict microwave background fluctuation amplitudes created by photons traversing time-dependent potential wells
1969 - R. A. Sunyaev[?] and Yakov Zel'dovich[?] study the inverse Compton scattering of microwave background photons by hot electrons
1990 - The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite shows that the microwave background has a nearly perfect blackbody spectrum and thereby strongly constrains the density of the intergalactic medium[?]
1992 - The COBE satellite discovers anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background
2003 - the WMAP satellite produces a high resolution map of the cosmic microwave background.

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