Robert Woodrow Wilson

Robert Woodrow Wilson was born January 10, 1936. In the mid-1960s, he and Arno Penzias were running tests with the Holmdel Horn Antenna at Bell Labs in New Jersey when they kept picking up unexplained atmospheric noise. They cleaned pigeon droppings off the equipment, checked every potential interference, and the signal persisted. It turned out to be cosmic microwave background radiation - the afterglow of the Big Bang - and in 1978 they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for it. In 1970, Wilson led the team that made the first detection of a rotational spectral line of carbon monoxide in the Orion Nebula and eight other sources, opening the door to using CO as the standard tracer for cool molecular gas. That detection became the founding moment for millimeter and submillimeter astronomy.