Two scientists who helped create the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Oct. 3.

The academy stated that John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and George Smoot of the University of California at Berkeley, Calif., were recognized “for work that looks back into the infancy of the universe and attempts to gain some understanding of the origin of galaxies and stars. It is based on measurements made with the help of the COBE satellite launched by NASA in 1989.”

The pair will split a prize amount of 10 million Swedish krona ($1.36 million).