IN THE BEGINNING - cont.

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 The steady-state supporters had accomplished most of what they wanted. They had shown that most of the elements could be created in stars, an idea that all scientists today embrace. But they failed to account for helium—they couldn’t make anywhere near enough of it in stars to match the amount seen in the universe. Only the big-bang theory could do that. Ironically, the success of the steady-state supporters in explaining the origin of the elements ended up hurting their argument for the origin of the universe.  

       The battle for the hearts and minds of cosmologists continued to rage through the 1950s and much of the 1960s. But as the 1960s wore on, observers started to pile up support for the Big Bang.  First, they noticed that far more quasars—the ultraluminous cores of young galaxies—and radio galaxies reside in the distant universe than nearby. Because light travels at a finite speed, we see objects far away as they were a long time ago, so these observations implied that the universe has changed over time.

        Even more significant, however, was the discovery of the cosmic background radiation by radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. Predicted as a natural outgrowth of the hot Big Bang by George Gamow and his collaborators, this radiation represents the fading echo of the original “fireball” explosion. Just as important, the steady-state theory could not reasonably explain the radiation.

The Cosmic Background Explorer spacecraft helped confirm that the universe originated in a Big Bang.