Relationship To The Big Bang
The cosmic microwave background radiation and the cosmological redshift-distance relation are together regarded as the best available evidence for the Big Bang theory. Measurements of the CMB have made the inflationary Big Bang theory the Standard Model of Cosmology. The discovery of the CMB in the mid-1960s curtailed interest in alternatives such as the steady state theory.
The CMB essentially confirms the Big Bang theory. In the late 1940s Alpher and Herman reasoned that if there was a big bang, the expansion of the Universe would have stretched and cooled the high-energy radiation of the very early Universe into the microwave region and down to a temperature of about 5 degrees K. They were slightly off with their estimate, but they had exactly the right idea. They predicted the CMB. It took another 15 years for Penzias and Wilson to stumble into discovering that the microwave background was actually there.
Since the Universe just came out of thermal equilibrium when the CMB was released, the Big Bang theory also implied this background radiation should have the characteristics of a perfect blackbody curve. It took another 25 years and the COBE satellite to confirm this was precisely the case.
Read more about this topic: Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
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