born April 26, 1933, Munich, Ger.
German-born U.S. astrophysicist.
His family fled Nazi Germany, and he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, after which he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked with cosmic background radiation stemming from the big bang explosion billions of years ago, from which the universe was created. They shared a 1978 Nobel Prize with Pyotr Kapitsa (1894–1984) for their work. In 1981 Penzias became a vice president at Bell Laboratories, retiring in 1998.