By Roland Piquepaille
The New Scientist writes that "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.
Cramer worked on the Big Bang for years now. He's the author or the Alternate View columns.
The issue 104, "BOOMERanG and the Sound of the Big Bang," has also been published by the Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine in January 2001.
Despite of the title, this column didn't offer any sounds. But in 2003, "a 11-year-old boy who wanted to know what the Big Bang sounded like for a school project." So Cramer decided to build such an audio file and added some precisions to his original column in September 2003.
One of the readers of this column asked if the "Sound of the Big Bang" mentioned in the title is actually recorded anywhere, so that one can listen to it. The short answer is "no", but the question set me to thinking: "Why not?" The spectrum of frequencies at which the universe was acting as a resonator has been well measured by BOOMERanG and more recently by WMAP. I'm an experienced user of the symbolic algebra program Mathematica, which provides the user with the capability of making mathematical functions into sound.
So yesterday morning I sat down and wrote a 16 line Mathematica notebook that produces a simulation of the "sound of the Big Bang", based on WMAP data. [Note: WMAP stands for NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe launched in 2001.] I used their power spectrum to combine a set of sine waves with amplitudes equal to the histogram areas of their points, modulated this with the measured profile of the emission of the original cosmic background radiation (center = 376,000 years = 50 seconds of simulation, width = 118,000 years = 15.7 seconds of simulation.), and shifted the frequencies down as time to the 2/3 power, the rate of growth of the radius of the universe in the early Big Bang.
The resulting simulated sound of the Big Bang can be heard here using a browser that supports .wav sound files, or can be downloaded (781 KB) and played on a media player.
It's not everyday that you'll hear 760,000 years compressed into 100 seconds.
Source: Marcus Chown, New Scientist, October 30, 2003; John Cramer, University of Washington, September 21, 2003
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