There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA

There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA

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Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer
SPACE.com andrea Thompson
senior Writer
space.com – Wed Jan 7, 10:31 pm ET

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.

The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.

Of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can't very efficiently. But radio waves can.

Radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum.

Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky). Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss.

But the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is far louder than astronomers expected.

There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission).

In July 2006, the instrument was launched from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet (36,500 meters), where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space.

ARCADE's mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.

"The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut said. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted."

Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.

Other radio galaxies also can't account for the noise – there just aren't enough of them.

"You'd have to pack them into the universe like sardines," said study team member Dale Fixsen of the University of Maryland. "There wouldn't be any space left between one galaxy and the next."

The signal is measured to be six times brighter than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe.

For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.

"We really don't know what it is,"said team member Michael Seiffert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

And not only has it presented astronomers with a new puzzle, it is obscuring the sought-for signal from the earliest stars. But the cosmic static may itself provide important clues to the development of galaxies when the universe was much younger, less than half its present age. Because the radio waves come from far away, traveling at the speed of light, they therefore represent an earlier time in the universe.

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I thought this may be a very interesting discovery and should not pass unnoticed .

The researchers calculate that the radio noise is much too large to be accounted for by the combined emissions of all the galaxies in the universe that emit radio waves. They also suggest that the static could be signals generated by the first supermassive black holes. Cosmologist David Spergel of Princeton University, not a member of the discovery team, says the static could also be from the first generation of stars. “And those are the most conservative explanations,” he adds.

Kogut and his colleagues base their findings on 2.5 hours of data gathered during a flight of seven radio receivers called ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission).

ARCADE’s radio receivers, which were cooled to a temperature just 2.7 degrees above absolute zero for the balloon flight on July 22, 2006, are the first detectors capable of definitively identifying the strange radio signals, Kogut says.

Kogut adds that a retrospective analysis of several other low-frequency radio-wave studies in the 1980s and 1990s hints at the unexpected static.

Because ARCADE operates at the same low temperature as the cosmic microwave background — the whisper of radiation left over from the Big Bang that itself was accidentally discovered as radio noise — heat from the instrument can’t be confused with the radio signals it detects. Emissions from the sky are also compared to an onboard radio-emitting source.

Data from the 36-kilometer-altitude flight, in which ARCADE examined about 7 percent of the sky centered over eastern Texas, reveals a pattern of radio signals that strongly resembles synchrotron emission.

Such emission is generated by electrons accelerated to high speeds by strong magnetic fields. Electrons energized by the maelstrom of activity, including intense magnetic fields, associated with an active supermassive black hole could produce this radiation, notes Spergel. So could star-forming regions, in which massive, short-lived stars explode as supernovas, accelerating charged particles to high speeds, he adds.

Kogut and his collaborators, who include Michael Seiffert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., don’t know the distance from which the radio signals originate. But the radio static does not match any known pattern from sources in the Milky Way. Nor can it be accounted for by nearby supermassive black holes or other radio sources in nearby galaxies, which are well studied, Kogut says. And a new population of radio-emitting galaxies, too faint to be observed directly, would have to vastly outnumber all the known galaxies in the universe in order to produce such a strong radio signal.

By process of elimination, that leaves some unknown source — possibly the first generation of supermassive black holes or the first stars — from the early universe. The radio spectrum seen by ARCADE “is telling us that we’re actually seeing a signature from a period of time that we know very little about and are very interested in,” says Spergel. A more exotic, less likely possibility, he adds, is radio emission from some new type of elementary particle.

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tear in the univesre....
probably not.
i wonder when the "world isn't flat" thing will happen again.

wow..

ive been seeing the moon here in virginia at 2pm for the past 2 days its regular(every day) but the time changes something crazy is going on and i really dont wanna know what

Maybe we are hearing the twin dimensional dying cry of our planet as we blow ourselves to kingdom come. I wonder if it is too late to stop it.

Couldn't ever be extraterrestrial communications. Nope, never. That's just a silly idea. Only approved sources can be considered. Yep, Yeppers

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