The Nobel Prize in Physics (2006)...

goes to John C. Mather and George F. Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". (From physorg.com)

US space scientists John Mather and George Smoot were awarded the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for a pioneering space mission which supports the "Big Bang" theory about the origins of the Universe.

The pair were the key minds behind a NASA mission to measure the aftershock of the cataclysmic explosion that occurred some 13.7 billion years ago and gave birth to the cosmos.

The unmanned spacecraft, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, not only gave flesh to the skeletal notion of the "Big Bang," which had developed in academic circles in the late 1940s, but also offered clues as to how and when the first galaxies came into being.

The results from COBE were "the greatest discovery of the century, if not all times," the British physicist Stephen Hawking has said.

- Gunnar Öquist (L), permanent secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences, and Per Carlson, chairman of the Nobel committee "These measurements... marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science," the Nobel jury said in its citation.

Mather, 60, is a senior astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, while Smoot, 61, is a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Mather was lauded for his work on so-called blackbody radiation -- a telltale pattern in the energy spectrum which comes from a body that is cooling down.

At its birth, the Universe was 3,000 degrees Celsius (5,432 degrees Fahrenheit). Since then, according to the Big Bang theory, the radiation has gradually cooled as the Universe has expanded.

This so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation -- the shockwave of energy that issued from the blast and is still radiating across the expanding skies as limits of the Universe are pushed back -- is barely 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, which is minus 273 degrees Celsius.

COBE was launched in November 1989.

The first results were received after nine minutes of observations, providing "a perfect blackbody spectrum," in other words -- as predicted -- a temperature profile of the Universe at that point after the Big Bang, the Nobel panel said.

When the curve was later shown at an astronomy conference, the results received a standing ovation.

"There really is not a good alternative explanation for having such a perfect black body spectrum. Many people looked, but no good explanation was found, so the Big Bang theory is confirmed by that spectrum," Mather said Tuesday in an interview with the Nobel Foundation.

Smoot's prize was for measuring tiny variations in the temperature of this radiation, thus proving the direction of the force of the Big Bang and the still-continuing expansion of the Universe.

These temperature differences also amount to fingerprints for cosmic sleuths, as they are the thresholds at which the matter in the infant Universe comes together.

Without this aggregation, nothing in today's Universe -- the galaxies, stars, life itself -- would exist....