Educated at City College of New York in New York City and Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 1962, Penzias joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J. In collaboration with Wilson he began monitoring radio emissions from a ring of gas encircling the Milky Way Galaxy. Unexpectedly, the two scientists detected a uniform microwave radiation that suggested a residual thermal energy throughout the universe of about 3 K. Most scientists now agree that this is the residual background radiation stemming from the primordial explosion billions of years ago from which the universe was created (see big-bang model). In 1976 Penzias became director of the Bell Radio Research Laboratory and in 1981 vice president of research at Bell Laboratories.