Big Bangremix! Scientists have devised an audio recreation of the Big Bang in high fidelity - that started our universe nearly 14 billion years ago.
A decade ago, spurred by a question for a fifth-grade science project, University of Washington physicist John Cramer devised an audio recreation of the Big Bang.
Now, armed with more sophisticated data from a satellite mission observing the cosmic microwave background a faint glow in the universe that acts as sort of a fossilised fingerprint of the Big Bang Cramer produced new recordings that fill in higher frequencies to create a fuller and richer sound.
The sound files run from 20 seconds to a little longer than 8 minutes. The effect is similar to what seismologists describe as a magnitude 9 earthquake causing the entire planet to actually ring. In this case, the ringing covered the entire universe before it grew to such gargantuan proportions.
‘Space-time itself is ringing when the universe is sufficiently small,’ Cramer said. He used data from the cosmic microwave background on temperature fluctuations in the very early universe.
The data on those wavelength changes were fed into a computer programme called Mathematica, which converted them to sound.
A decade ago, spurred by a question for a fifth-grade science project, University of Washington physicist John Cramer devised an audio recreation of the Big Bang.
Now, armed with more sophisticated data from a satellite mission observing the cosmic microwave background a faint glow in the universe that acts as sort of a fossilised fingerprint of the Big Bang Cramer produced new recordings that fill in higher frequencies to create a fuller and richer sound.
The sound files run from 20 seconds to a little longer than 8 minutes. The effect is similar to what seismologists describe as a magnitude 9 earthquake causing the entire planet to actually ring. In this case, the ringing covered the entire universe before it grew to such gargantuan proportions.
‘Space-time itself is ringing when the universe is sufficiently small,’ Cramer said. He used data from the cosmic microwave background on temperature fluctuations in the very early universe.
The data on those wavelength changes were fed into a computer programme called Mathematica, which converted them to sound.