Echoes from the Bang

It is commonly known that the Big Bang wasn't so much an enormous explosion as it was an enormous expansion; to put it another way, it was more like an airbag deploying than a bomb detonating. But it is noisy, as anyone who has had an airbag inflate in their face will attest. Both were not the originals.

The echoes have gotten incredibly weak throughout the ages. It wasn't until 2014 that one of these waves was first measured, despite the fact that we have known about these energy echoes flowing across the universe since the 1960s. It makes sense since, according to Nature magazine, the Big Bang's aftershocks are separated by roughly 500 million lightyears.

In fact, the previous year, University of Washington scientist John Cramer created a 100-second demo of the sound the universe made when it first began approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang, around the time the hydrogen haze began to form. The sound is more like a drone that progressively increases in pitch rather than music, similar to what may be heard in a science fiction show when a UFO arrives. But again, the universe was more concerned in converting hydrogen into anything else than in taking home Grammys, so it was probably just good for one listen out of curiosity.