Big Bang Sounded Like a Deep Hum

[Guest guest]

Once again, science confirms which Hinduism has been saying all

along! This article, by Marcus Chown, appears in the latest issue of

New Scientist; the URL is below. What the article does *not* address

is: Who was doing the humming? That part you must discover for

yourself ...

 

BIG BANG SOUNDED LIKE A DEEP HUM

 

The Big Bang sounded more like a deep hum than a bang, according to

an analysis of the radiation left over from the cataclysm.

 

Physicist John Cramer of the University of Washington in Seattle has

created audio files of the event which can be played on a PC. "The

sound is rather like a large jet plane flying 100 feet above your

house in the middle of the night," he says.

 

Giant sound waves propagated through the blazing hot matter that

filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. These squeezed and

stretched matter, heating the compressed regions and cooling the

rarefied ones.

 

Even though the Universe has been expanding and cooling ever since,

the sound waves have left their imprint as temperature variations on

the afterglow of the big bang fireball, the so-called cosmic

microwave background.

 

Cramer was prompted to recreate the din last heard 13.7 billion

years ago by an 11-year-old boy who wanted to know what the Big Bang

sounded like for a school project.

 

To produce the sound, Cramer took data from NASA's Wilkinson

Microwave Anisotropy Probe. Launched in 2001, the probe has been

measuring tiny differences in the temperature between different

parts of the sky.

>From these variations, he could calculate the frequencies of the

sound waves propagating through the Universe during its first

760,000 years, when it was just 18 million light years across. At

that time the sound waves were too low in frequency to be audible.

To hear them, Cramer had to scale the frequencies 100,000 billion

billion times.

 

Nevertheless, the loudness and pitch of the sound waves reflect what

happened in the early Universe. During the 100-second recording, the

frequencies fall because the sound waves get stretched as the

Universe expands. "It becomes more of a bass instrument," says

Cramer.

 

URL: http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99994320