PHYS 180 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Big Bang, Photon Gas, George Gamow
Document Summary
Cosmic microwave background with respect to structure formation. Structure formation: formation of everything we see around us today. Gamow, alpher, and bethe first suggested in 1946 that with a big bang model the universe would be hot/dense enough for nucleosynthesis what it was 200 seconds old. Turn the universe around and study the physics that would be happening as a function of time and temperature. Alpha and herman in 1948 predicted that there should be relic radiation from that era which should have a temperature of -5k today. There should be an afterglow from the big bang. This was considered too cold to detect until after wwii when radio technology had greatly improved. This 5k essentially photon gas should be detectable. The kind of radiation you emit depends on your temperature. At 5k the radiation is very long low energy wavelengths.
