Is it true that you can see the echo of the "big bang" by watching interference on your television set?

Question

Bit of advice for those that don't know the answer. Save yourself the bother of typing anything

Answer 1

It's not really an "echo" of the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background radiation consists of photons from the "time of recombination" about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. This is a long way back to the beginning, since the Big Bang happened 13,700,000,000 years ago. Between the time of the Bang and 400,000 years later, all photons where trapped in the matter, because the matter consisted of charged particles. At around 400,000 years, the average temperature of the Universe cooled to around 5000 degrees, allowing the electrons and nuclei to combine into atoms for the first time. This is known as the "time of recombination", although strictly speaking it's not a "re" combination, it's the first combination. The freed photons have been streaming in a straight line ever since.

These photons are now highly redshifted (a factor of around 1000), and now have an energy corresponding to radio wavelengths. When you tune between channels on your TV, some of these photons contribute to the random signal that makes up the "salt and pepper" no-signal blank screen. Maybe 10% of that blank screen picture is caused by photons from the time of recombination, the rest is caused by thermal noise in your TV receiver and pickup from the ground. The signal from the cosmos cannot be distinguished from these other sources---they are all thermal noise, but some amount of that thermal noise comes from the early universe.

In order to see this effect, your TV must, of course, be hooked up to an antenna. It must also be a relatively simple analog TV that does not intelligently suppress noise signals.

The power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background, expressed in "antenna noise temperature" units, is pretty flat at 2.7 K from zero frequency up to around 150 GHz, and then it tapers off and is nearly zero again by 250 GHz. At frequencies below around 40 MHz, the Earth's ionosphere is opaque and so the signals are blocked, but in the VHF television band (50 to 170 MHz), the UHF television bands (300 MHz to 3 GHz), and satellite TV bands (4 to 10 GHz), the signal does get through and will contribute a noticable fraction of the noise to a modern low-noise receiver.

Answer 2

Not to any major degree. You need a Dicke radiometer to see the small 3.5K temperature difference between Cosmic MicroWaves and general white noise created by the remainder of the spectrum.

CMW might certainly be mixed in with the white noise in general, but you are not seeing, exclusively, the echo of the big bang.

Since white noise comes from all random wavelenghts made by all particles as well as from humanly created carrier waves and data signals, the distrubance you are seeing is far above the threshold of pure, Big Bang CMW.

You also have to take into account that TV sets sensitivity to video signal strength starts at 7 on a scale of 1 to 100.

Big Bang CMW would be well below 1 on that scale of sensitivity.

So, basically you can't because by the nature of an analog TV set the CMW would be filtered out or below the circuit sensitivity level of such a small distrubance as a 4 degree kelvin increase or a frequency in the ghz range, which CMW is.

Answer 3

Yes. This is true. The static on the TV is the counterpart of the noise we hear on empty radio channels. This static/noise is from microwave radiation which has cooled down to approximately 3-4 Kelvin and is present all around us and in space. You could point an antenna to any direction in the sky and hear/see this.

At the big bang the radiation was incredibly hotter than it is now. As it cooled over the last 12-15 billion years it's wavelength has increased and the temperature has dropped to approximately 3-4 kelvin. The COBE satellite had measured differences in this temperature to approximately 1/100000. The hotter areas correspond to sites in the universe that had more energy/mass density and are thought to have formed galaxies (because they had a higher concentration of mass/energy).

An incredible amount of information is available by studying the radiation (which includes the visible spectrum - light).

Answer 4

surely though if space is a vacuum how can there be an echo??

and if all objects are moving away from each other because of the big bang, the initial bang would have sent a shockwave of radiation and particals much further ahead in space than we are currently located so you would not hear an echo unless there was something out there for the shockwave to bounce off and come back towards us?

Answer 5

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Answer 6

Yes, it is true. You can, but you'll never know which interference is caused by a radio tower, for example, and which one by that echo.

Answer 7

If you tune a television between stations, some of the "snow" is from the CMB. It's only a few percent though. so as mrquestion said, you can't isolate it.

Answer 8

scientists discovered the 'echo' of radiation as a background noise(extremely small one,undetected otherwise) in the sky,using specialised noise detecting environments(they had too shoo away pigeons for avoiding misintepreting noise caused by pigeon droppings on the equipment) and instruments ...i very much doubt that TV is capable of detecting them

Answer 9

Yes

Answer 10

no because an echo comes from there being an end somewere to bounce off of and the universe has no end.