Talk:Cosmic Background Explorer

Black Body Radiation Plot

This plot has a maximum at about 5.5 waves/cm. This corresponds to a wavelength of 1.8 mm. By Wien's Law this indicates a blackbody temperature of only 1.6 Kelvins. What's up with that? 66.99.149.245 (talk) 20:50, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

COBE had conked out on launch, it was completely worthless

COBE malfunctioned badly upon launch. Therefore, data from it was completely worthless. This is not anyone's opinion, but something quietly documented by Mather himself. So DO NOT delete this comment unless you want to maintain a grand lie. Here is Mather's data as described by him. Show this to any real expert, and he will immediately tell you that this experiment was bogus:

REMOVED LINK TO COMMERCIAL SITE —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.17.60.136 (talk) 19:03, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

John Mather acknowledges on public record issues with COBE Satellite

In the Fall of 2009, responding to a question on the Nobel YouTube's "Ask a Nobel Laureate" Program as to whether anyone had contradicted his discovery, John Mather said: “No, I don’t think anybody has tried seriously to contradict the measurements. There are a few people who don’t think we did it right but there are only a few such people.”

See the video clip: https://miroguide.com/items/2761696 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.124.39.157 (talk) 14:25, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Recently published NASA official video discusses serious problems with the COBE calbrator - presumably at the very late stages of testing prior to launch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrtoUgeKyIo —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.125.21.189 (talk) 03:36, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Optical Society of America strongly reaffirms COBE Satellite measurements

In electing John Mather a Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2010 for "extraordinarily precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation of the Big Bang," the OSA most recently reaffirmed the John Mather COBE Satellite measurements. http://www.osa.org/aboutosa/awards/fellows/recentfellows/2010.aspx —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.125.21.189 (talk) 19:34, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

could someone define "HI" and "HII"?

Section 3.2, Detecting early galaxies, uses the terms "HI" and "HII" without introducing them. Could someone give definitions, full names, or links? 128.83.67.213 (talk) 20:46, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Done. ChiZeroOne (talk) 23:26, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Frequency Should be Wavenumber?

This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Background_Explorer#mediaviewer/File:Cmbr.svg says "frequency" on the x axis is in units of 1/cm when it should be "wavenumber": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavenumber — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheDemx27 (talk • contribs) 18:39, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

"thus proving the Berkeley-Nagoya results erroneous."

This claim in the article is unsourced and I removed it. I believe a scientific source would not use the word "proving". So far I have found only oblique refs that might apply. Johnjbarton (talk) 22:34, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

If you're going to cite just one FIRAS paper...

The FIRAS team published four papers in ApJ 420, this article cites just one of them (the 2nd), and I'm ok with just one but I would have picked a different one. I would suggest the first one, "Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Spectrum by the COBE FIRAS Instrument," Mather etal ApJ 420 439.

I'm not going to make this change, I'm just dropping this suggestion; if someone agrees with me go for it. Dcottingham (talk) 23:42, 16 July 2026 (UTC)