Wilson, Robert W

Wilson, Robert W(oodrow)

(born Jan. 10, 1936, Houston, Texas, U.S.) U.S. radio astronomer. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1963 and headed its Radio Physics Research Department (1976–94). With his colleague Arno Penzias, he detected the cosmic background radiation, a discovery for which the two men shared a 1978 Nobel Prize (with Pyotr Kapitsa [1894–1984], who was honoured for research unrelated to theirs).