Physicists now have amazingly detailed images of what the Universe looked like just after the the Big Bang, but what about the sound of the moment of creation?
While it's near certain we'll never hear a recording of the instant time began, physicist John Cramer has created the next best thing.
Ten years ago, the professor at the University of Washington create an audio simulation of what the Big Bang sounded like using data from the WMAP survey of the cosmic background radiation. Last month, a more detailed survey of the red-shifted radiation taken by the Planck space probe was released and Cramer remixed his audio file to match the more accurate data. You can listen to the recording below.
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While you might think that because space is a vacuum the explosion of a singularity wouldn't make any sound at all, Cramer told QMI that "the Big Bang is the exception to this, because the medium that pervaded the universe in the first 100,000 years or so was far more dense than the atmosphere of the Earth."
In other words, matter was so dense in the early Universe that it carried sounds waves in much the same way air does on Earth.
The recording tracks the fluctuations in the Planck data to reflect the proliferation of pressure through the cosmic soup of the Universe during the first 760,000 years after its birth.
While the Big Bang did make a sound in this sense, the frequencies would have been too low for humans to hear, Cramer explains in a posting on his university's website. To compensate, the frequencies used in the simulation were "scaled upward by a huge factor (about 10 to the 26 power)."
The recordings have made headlines around the world, but Cramer's canine companions may be his biggest fans. The physicist told NBC his dogs bark loudly whenever the recording is played.
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