Michelle Thaller
speaker
1,835 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
Michelle Thaller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Everywhere they looked, it was the same.
Didn't matter what direction the telescope was pointing.
And so what a good scientist would assume is that that's probably a problem with your telescope.
If you have background noise in every direction you look, it's probably in your detector.
And the best guess they had was that it was pigeon shit.
So there you go.
Pigeon, look at that.
Wow.
So, so, so, so Penzias and Wilson built this, you know, they, they, they were working with this big microwave telescope.
And little did I know that pigeon shit actually gives off microwaves.
It does.
They, they trapped all the pigeons in the, in the microwave telescope.
You could actually see a pigeon trap in the Smithsonian where they, they did this.
They, they scraped out all the pigeon shit.
And, and lo and behold, the signal was still there.
In every direction you looked, it was exactly the same.
Exactly.
And what they had discovered was the afterglow of the Big Bang, the energy left over from that time when the universe was so hot, it was opaque to light.
And the crazy thing is, it is exactly the same down to fractions of a degree in every direction on the sky.
It's sort of like, you know, you look all the way the age of the universe in one direction, it's exactly the same temperature as the age of the universe in that direction.
Showing 1261–1280 of 1,835 · page 64 of 92
← Previous
Next →