John Mather (top) and George Smoot. (Reuters)

Stockholm, Oct. 3 (Reuters): Americans John Mather and George Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics today for spearheading a satellite programme that added weight to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.37 million) prize, said the two men were instrumental to the success of the cosmic background explorer (COBE) satellite programme launched by Nasa in 1989.

Measurements taken by the satellite offered insights into the age of the universe, galaxies and stars by calculating the temperature of cosmic microwave background radiation, a relic of the infant universe, the academy said.

“The COBE results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the Universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE,” it added.

Medicine prize

Yesterday, Americans Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the 2006 Nobel Prize for medicine for their discovery of how to switch off genes, a potential road to new treatments for diseases from AIDS to blindness.