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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

Example Sentences

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microwave background

As a result, the enhanced clustering does not create a stronger gravitational imprint on the cosmic microwave background.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 2, 2026

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

They used measurements of the cosmic microwave background to estimate how matter was distributed shortly after the Big Bang.

From Science Daily ● Mar. 6, 2026

Throughout the decades, numerous observations of how dust, gas, and ripples in the cosmic microwave background, or the leftover radiation from the primordial plasma of the universe, moved indicated that dark matter exists.

From Salon ● Dec. 26, 2024

Observations of the microwave background and of the abundances of the light elements indicate that the early universe did not have the kind of curvature required to allow time travel.

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