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| Robert
W. Wilson
Robert W. Wilson
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
abstract
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Robert Wilson was
born in Texas and attended Rice University. His graduate work
was at the California Institute of Technology under the supervision
of J. G. Bolton, seeking the radio background emitted by the
halo of the Milky Way. As Member of Technical Staff at Bell
Laboratories, he made a series of remarkable discoveries. With
Arno Penzias, he detected the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation,
one of the fundamental discoveries of observational cosmology.
They won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work in 1978. Working
with Penzias and K. B. Jefferts, he made the first detection
of ground-state interstellar carbon monoxide, a discovery that
is central to the study of star formation. Wilson helped design
the Bell Laboratories 7m diameter millimeter-wave telescope—this
instrument is a design precursor to the newly-installed 10m
South Pole Telescope. Wilson supervised the development of control
and data reduction software for the Antarctic Submillimeter-wave
Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST/RO). Currently, Wilson
is at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where
he contributes to the Submillimeter Array.
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