A snowy and somewhat harrowing trip to Iowa for a family gathering and again on the way back. But we had a good time and I now need to clean the snow off my observatory.
Scientists are a notoriously conservative and skeptical group of people.
Basically, the theoretical models predicted this radiation and even the approximate temperature. And there it was, just as predicted by the models. That, too, was a critical experiment which provided convincing evidence for relativity. Relativity was also strongly supported by the measured precession of Mercury's orbit. The point is that not all experiments are created equal.