Penzias, Arno Allan 1933-
US astrophysicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Munich, Germany, a refugee with his family from Nazi Germany, he was educated at Columbia University, New York, and joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1961, finally becoming vice-president of research there in 1981. In 1963 he and his colleague Robert Wilson were assigned the task of tracing the radio noise that was interfering with Earth-satellite-Earth communications, eventually discovering the residual relic of the intense heat that was associated with the birth of the universe following the hot Big Bang. This was the cosmic microwave background radiation predicted to exist by George Gamow and Ralph Alpher in 1948. In 1970, with Wilson and K B Jefferts, Penzias discovered the radio spectral line of carbon monoxide; this has since been used as a tracer of galactic gas clouds. Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1978, along with Peter Kapitza. He published Ideas and Information in 1989.