That scenario, developed by Belgian priest Georges Lemaître under the name “the Primeval Atom” but eventually dubbed “the Big Bang model,” predicts that the early universe was not only denser but also hotter. So hot and dense that it would have been glowing like the interior of a star, and all of that radiation should still suffuse space today, ready for detection in our telescopes. That’s just what happened in the fateful spring of 1964, when astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Laboratories detected the cosmic microwave background radiation, leftover light from the early
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