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microwave background

British

noun

a background of microwave electromagnetic radiation with a black-body spectrum discovered in 1965, understood to be the thermal remnant of the big bang with which the universe began

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

microwave background Scientific

See cosmic background radiation

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microwave background

Arno Penzias at Bell Labs won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering “cosmic microwave background radiation” from the Big Bang.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 29, 2026

The cosmic microwave background, which is the faint afterglow left behind by the Big Bang, contains valuable information about the early universe.

From Science Daily ● Mar. 16, 2026

However, interest in evolving dark energy was vigorously rekindled last year from the combination of supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillation, and cosmic microwave background data from the DES, DESI, and Planck experiments.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 4, 2025

They’ve measured the cosmic microwave background, or leftover radiation from the Big Bang, with extremely high precision to help paint a picture of the first nanoseconds of the universe.

From Salon ● Jan. 17, 2025

This is consistent with the observations of the microwave background radiation, which show that it has almost exactly the same intensity in any direction.

From "A Brief History of Time: And Other Essays" by Stephen Hawking

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023