Arno Allan Penzias (born 26.04.1933) is an American experimental physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1975). He was born in Munich. He has lived in the USA since 1940. He graduated from Columbia University (1958). From 1961 he has worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (from 1972 as head of the department of radiophysical research).
His work was in space physics, radio-astronomical technique, satellite communications and cosmology. Together with R. W. Wilson he detected experimentally (1965) the cosmic microwave background radiation, with a temperature of about 3 K, which fills the Universe (Nobel Prize, 1978), and in 1973 cosmic deuterium.