Cosmic Background Explorer

Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) was a NASA satellite launched in 1989 to measure the cosmic microwave background. It established its nearly perfect blackbody spectrum and detected tiny temperature variations across the sky.

Cosmic microwave background: The thermal radiation left over from the hot early universe, now observed at microwave wavelengths. COBE measured this radiation’s spectrum and small temperature variations.
George Smoot: An American astrophysicist who led the COBE team that mapped temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. His leadership connected COBE’s sky map to evidence about the early universe.
Arno Penzias: An American physicist who co-discovered the cosmic microwave background with Robert Wilson in 1965. His discovery established the radiation COBE was designed to measure precisely.
Planck satellite: A European Space Agency satellite that mapped the cosmic microwave background from 2009 to 2013. Planck measured the same background with much finer angular resolution and broader frequency coverage.
Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer: A COBE instrument that measured the cosmic microwave background’s spectrum across far-infrared and microwave wavelengths. Its measurements established the background’s near-perfect blackbody spectrum.
John C. Mather: An American astrophysicist who led COBE’s blackbody-spectrum measurement team. His work on COBE’s spectrum shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Robert Wilson: An American radio astronomer who co-discovered the cosmic microwave background with Arno Penzias in 1965. The discovery he shared motivated a satellite study of the background’s spectrum and structure.
Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics: A balloon-borne experiment that mapped cosmic microwave background anisotropies over a large region of sky. BOOMERANG offered higher-resolution maps than COBE over a limited sky area.
Differential Microwave Radiometer: A COBE instrument that mapped differences in microwave brightness across the sky at three frequencies. It detected the cosmic microwave background’s primordial temperature anisotropies.
Big Bang nucleosynthesis: The production of light atomic nuclei during the first minutes after the Big Bang. COBE’s evidence for a hot early universe complemented abundance tests of its history.

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