The 2006 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to John Mather and George Smoot for their contribution to the big bang theory of the origin of the universe.

The pair were honored for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Smoot’s announcement in 1992 that his team had observed the long-sought variations in the CMB — and therefore, in the early universe –shook the scientific community.

Called “the discovery of the century, if not of all time”, by Stephen Hawking, the discovery of these ripples and wrinkles in the very fabric of space-time are believed to be the primordial seeds of modern-day structures in our universe such as galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and so on.