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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey Shortwaivers, it's Regina Barbara. Can I admit something to you? I learned about the

beginning of the universe the way I learn about a lot of things on TV. For

thousands of years people have wondered about the universe.

That it all started with a singularity, a brief moment in time called the Big Bang.

One view of the universe prevailed.

But here's the thing, even though that definition is fairly common, it's not how many scientists

talk about the Big Bang now.

Today, when you hear people use the phrase Big Bang, they often mean the time period that we might otherwise call the early universe.

So they're often talking about, I don't know, roughly like the first few hundred thousand years of space time's existence, the Big Bang era instead of just the Big Bang.

That's Chanda Prescott Weinstein, a theoretical physicist and an expert in cosmology, which is the study of how the universe began.

But how do we observe that beginning, that Big Bang era, and why do we talk about it differently now?

To understand that, we have to go back 60 years.

To a lab with a giant horn-shaped antenna in New Jersey,

and to two radio astronomers, Arno Penzius and Robert Wilson.

To see photos of them, they're standing next to this giant antenna,

arms wide open looking at the sky.

...