Nov 17 1977
From The Space Library
NASA reported that a team of researchers using ultrasensitive radio equipment aboard an Ames Research Center U-2 jet aircraft to measure the background microwave radiation in the cosmos had concluded that the event initiating the universe had begun not with a violent and uncontrolled "big bang" but with "an extremely smooth process," in which matter and energy were uniformly distributed and kept expanding at an equal rate in all directions.
Drs. Richard Muller and George Smoot, with graduate student Marc Gorenstein, of the Lawrence Laboratory and the Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley, had designed and operated the radio equipment for the project funded by NASA and the Dept. of Energy. The plane had flown at 65,000ft altitude above 90% of earth's atmosphere to make the sensitive experiments indicating that the Milky Way galaxy (including earth and its solar system) was flying through space toward the constellation Hydra at a uniform speed of more than 1 million mph-so uniform that "it provides a universal reference for measuring this motion," said Gorenstein. The large-scale regularity found in the expansion of the universe made the speed of the local motion discovered for the earth "all the more surprising," said Dr. Muller. Furthermore, the measurements "seem to show that there is no rotation of the universe," Dr. Smoot said, which was surprising because "we can see that everything within the universe is rotating-planets, stars, and galaxies. If there is rotation it has to be less than one hundred millionth of a rotation in the last billion years.... Either conditions before the beginning were very regular, or processes we don't yet know about worked to make the universe extremely uniform." The uniformity was greater than 1 part in 1000 for matter, 1 in 3000 for energy, and 1 in 10 000 for expansion. (NASA Release 77-235; ARC Release 77-45)
NASA announced it had appointed Raymond A. Kline as associate administrator for management operations, effective Nov. 20. Coming to NASA Hq in 1968, he had been acting associate administrator for center operations from July of this year. Previously he had served for 6yr on Dr. Wernher von Braun's executive staff at MSFC. (NASA anno Nov 17/77)
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