Arno Penzias

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Arno Penzias

Arnold Allan Penzias (born April 26, 1933 in Munich ) is a German - American physicist and astronomer . He received in 1978 along with Robert Woodrow Wilson the physics - Nobel Prize for the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation .

Life

Penzias was born in Munich to a German Jewish family. The parents ran a leather goods shop in Munich. When the living conditions in Nazi Germany became increasingly unsustainable for the family, she planned to emigrate to the United States. In the spring of 1939, at the age of six, Arno Penzias was able to travel to England with his younger brother on a Kindertransport . His parents followed a little later and shortly after the outbreak of war in December 1939 the family emigrated to the USA on the Georgic , where Penzias was naturalized in 1946. In 1951 he finished high school and in 1954 received a bachelor's degree from City College of New York . He received a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1958 , and received his doctorate from Charles Hard Townes in 1962.

Together with Wilson, he worked in Holmdel , New Jersey , in 1965 , using a large radio antenna that belonged to Bell Laboratories . The two encountered a disturbing background noise, which was the same from all directions and at all times. For a year the two searched in vain for the cause of the uninterrupted hissing that made their actual experimental work impossible. They checked all the devices and circuits, but could not find any cause.

Robert Henry Dicke , who was looking for the background radiation with a research group at neighboring Princeton University , concluded after a phone call from the two of them that they had found the radiation predicted by George Gamow by chance. A short time later, two articles appeared in the Astrophysical Journal . Penzias and Wilson's article described how they encountered the background radiation, and in the second article, Dicke explained what it was.

In 1975 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1990 he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering .

On April 26, 2019, the 3 m radio telescope built by the Nürnberger Astronomische Gesellschaft eV (NAG) and primarily intended for popular education was named Arno Penzias radio telescope at the Regiomontanus observatory in Nuremberg in honor of Arno Penzias " baptized "and in the presence of the Bavarian Prime Minister Dr. Markus Söder handed over to the city of Nuremberg and thus to the public.

Awards

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member Directory: Arno A. Penzias. National Academy of Sciences, accessed December 12, 2015 .
  2. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1950-1999. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, accessed December 12, 2015 (PDF file).
  3. NAE Members: Dr. Arno A. Penzias. National Academy of Engineering, accessed December 12, 2015 .
  4. Nuremberg is now listening to space: new radio telescope inaugurated . Nuremberg News. May 1, 2019. Retrieved August 18, 2019.

Web links

Commons : Arno Penzias  - collection of images, videos and audio files