John C. Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and George F. Smoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory received the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics. They will split the $1.3 million prize. They headed a team of scientists and engineers who developed the COBE satellite which was launched in 1989. It measured the temperature and distribution of microwaves, including “irregularities” or the seeds from which galaxies grew. The results of their work confirmed that there was a Big Bang—an explosion that took place 14 billion years ago.

The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on October 3, 2006.