Big Bang echo????

[divegirl]

My 14 year old son came home from school yesterday saying that in Science they had been discussing whether you could still hear an echo from the Big Bang.....He was a little confused by the class, but said that something was mentioned about static electricity..... Any ideas whether this is true? TIA

Lisa x

[rojash]

Nothing to to with static electricity, but background radiation (using "static" in the sense of noise - as you might refer to background noise on a radio program). See this link for details:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?* ******=4655517

[Clanad]

Tune your television to an "emtpy" channel... one that no station is broadcasting on. See the snow? About one fourth of that phenomena is the remnants, or echo of the Big Bang. The discoverer's of the beginning of the universe, Dr. John C. Mather and George F. Smoot of the University of California were recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research using the Cobe satellite (Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite)...

[jake-the-peg]

This is one of the most remarkable stories of 20th Century science.

In 1948 it was pointed out that if the Big Bang was true we should be able to detect a faint background radiation - the left over energy from the birth of the universe.

They estimated that it should be the equivilent of 5 degrees Kelvin and should be the same everywhere. It then kind of got dropped a bit until in 1965 a couple of astronomers called Penzias and Wilson were having trouble with a signal that they couldn't get rid of - everywhere the same no matter how much they cleaned their kit.

The signal was 3.5 degrees Kelvin - they had found the cosmic background radiation ! and the 1978 Nobel Prize for physics.

As Clanad says the Nobel prize went back there this year too for mapping out the detailed structure of it using the cobe satellite.

[divegirl]

Thank you all very much.

Lisa x