The two groups agreed to publish their papers simultaneously in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal. The Princeton group discussed their theory of the background radiation’s cosmological origin, while the Bell Labs team reported, in the most conservative of language and with no mention of cosmology, the detection of uniform microwave radiation permeating space. Neither paper mentioned the earlier work of Gamow, Alpher, and Herman. For their discovery, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics.
