Space Roar

radio wave information. And this kind of stuff has made the rounds on the Internet time and time again. Before the Internet, it was even available on vinyl. And it's it is. It's haunting, it's beautiful. It's like the sound of space whales um, you know, singing in the cosmos. But just imagine, just imagine that you go to eavesdrop on space one day. Can you hear something that is ferociously loud? Yeah, something that sounds a little like this. Okay,

maybe not exactly that. Yeah. That that I want to be clear is is not an actual sonification of anything from our universe. That is a creation by our our sound designer and producer, Noel Brown, and we wanted to include that clip because we're not exactly sure what this space war which actually exists sounds like. Yeah, so all we know it's six times louder than anything else out there, and it is a mystery. It is this haunting, perhaps

even disturbing on an intellectual level. Uh, noise, just discordia emanating from the universe, and uh we throw our best theories at it, and nothing so far has really stuck. Uh, you can't help but let your imagination run wild, of course, like I instantly, I instantly they turn to Lovecraft's HP Lovecrafts Demon sultan as is Off, which was quote that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion, which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity, who gnaws hungrily, admits the muffled,

maddening beat of vile drums anothermost confusion. Yeah, we're gonna have to use that. Um. Yeah, And this is not the first time that we've had this kind of nice, deep mystery to chew on, right, like we have had sounds emanating from the depths of the ocean, from the depths of space. Now, um, that make us wonder what exactly is going on. And so that's what we're going to try to do today, plumb the depths of this sound and figure out what it is and where it's

coming from. Indeed, we're gonna examine this universe wide phenomenon of the space roar. Now, let me just clarify a couple of things to start off. When we're talking about listening to the space roar or any of these these cosmic sounds, the soonification of the data. You know, we're not talking about actual sound traveling through space. Sound travels and waves just like light, just like heat, But unlike

light and heat, sound travels by making molecules vibrate. So for sound to actually travel, say from a ringing bell to your ear, there has to be a molecule filled medium for it to travel through. Here on Earth, air molecules provide the pathway, but in space, particularly deep space,

there are just no molecules to vibrate, that's right. So what we are relying on when we talk about eavesdropping in space, we're relying on radio waves and in n American physicist Karl Jansky first detected radio static from our very own milky way galaxy and similar emission from other galaxies creates this kind of background hits of radio noise. So when we talk about radio waves, where we're talking about well, they are one of what we call electromagnetic waves.

So electromagnetic waves include light, radio, X ray, gamma ray, and infrared and ultra for violet. And the thing that differentiates them is their wavelength. So a wavelength of say light, stretched out over a long, long, long and long distance ratchets down its energy and then it shifts it into a radio wave. So in other words, radio waves are just another form of light. And this means that light from a distant galaxy can't perceive by sight, but it

can be heard by radio telescopes. Hence all those bubbles and squeaks we can hear when a radio telescope homes in on say Uranus or Jupiter. So that brings us to ARCADE. ARCADE being a two thousand and six NASA experiment developed by the Goddard Space Flight Center. ARCADE stands for Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, astrophysics, and Diffuse emission, and

essentially it's uh it was. It was a high altitude balloon payload designed to study the early universe by measuring the frequency spectrum of the ca es make microwave background or c m D and searching for signals from the first stars to form after the Big Bang. See heat from the Big Bang still permeates the universe today, and scientists can observe it as this faint glow of deep

space microwaves. This is the cosmic microwave background, and it contains what some scientists dub quote a fossil record of every of every early universe. I like that idea, that fossil record. I really like the fossil record analogy too. Yeah, and the instrumentation aboard this device is pretty crazy. The

official Arcade website makes the following comparison. Imagine warming your hands by the light of the stars in the night sky, you know, standing out on a cold day, raising your palms up and warming yourself by that those distant pinpricks of light. Impossible right now. Imagine trying to detect the heat from stars we can't even see, like you mentioned earlier, than the light from those stars just turning nothing but

radio waves after a while. That's why NASA's Gotta Space Flight Center designed Arcade to measure temperature differences as small as one one thousandth of a degree in the background only three degrees above absolute zero, while also avoiding confusing data from everything else in the universe. So the entire instrument inside this ballooned uh lifted package was cooled with liquid helium to to a to a temperature of two

point seven degrees above absolute zero. So they made it as cold, if not a little colder than the CMB, so there's no confusion for its seven cryogenic radiometers. So July two thousand six successfully launched this sucker from Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas. It ascended to an altitude of one thousand feet or thirty seven kilometers, and

after four hours of observation, parachuted back to Earth. Oh and what did Dr Alan Cogert, a research scientist at Nassas Cattard Space Flight Center and head of the Arcade project, Fine, Well, he found something was absolutely astounding, and honestly, he was just hoping to find confirmation of the cosmic microwave background and gather a few nude radio emission points. But says quote, the universe really threw us a curve instead of the faint signal we hope to find there was this booming

noise six times ladder than anyone had predicted. He says, the energy alone that could generate this level of signal is incomprehensible. And Uh, I've seen accounts of it. It's been described as a static like noise coming from all directions. And the discovery is based on noise measurements and the microwave frequency bands at three, eight thirty and ninety giga hurts which peaked NASIS detectors at three and eight giga hurts. So they were observing about seven percent of the sky

when they had this booming sound come to them. Yeah, and so we have a big fat mystery on our hands here. Um. It's uh, it's important to to drive home that this is not like a one time signals. This isn't like the Wow signal or the bloop uh that came from the ocean that we've discussed in the vast UH. This is a universe wide phenomenon that is ongoing. But Arcade was the first instrument to meant to that was actually able to measure the radio sky with enough

precision to detect this mysterious signal. Uh. And ironically, the roar hides the signal uh or seems to hide the signal from the earliest stars, thus interfering with the very mission we originally sent Arcade up for to begin with. All right, so let's take a quick break and we come back. We're not going to provide an answer to this mystery. We're not gonna solve them, but we're gonna We're gonna talk about some of the ideas that have been thrown out there, most of which are have been

shot down as well. But I think the theories, even the ones that ultimately don't hold up, helped to illuminate what might be happening and just the sphere of possible answers. All Right, we'll back. Have you ever seen those maps that say you are here, shows you in the middle of the Milky Way. Oh no, I was just thinking about the zoo. But the zoo, Yeah, you're here at

the zoo. Yeah, I get lost enough there without even taking into account I see the map, right, But you maybe have seen those illustrations before which say, hey, by the way, the Solar system is located within the Milky Way galaxy, so it makes sense that one of the first places we would look to to try to solve the mystery of the roar is of course the Milky Way, because it produces something called synchrotron radiation, which is electromagnetic

energy emitted by charged particles. We're talking about electrons and ions that are moving at speeds close to that of light when their paths are altered as by magnetic fields. It is so called because particles moving at such speeds in a variety of particle accelerator that is known as synchrotron produce electromagnetic radiation of this sort. Now, okay, great, it's creating electromagnetic radiation. We can pick up on that

as we know. Um that being said, it doesn't look like our galaxy is the culprit because, according to dal Dale Fixen, a University of Maryland research scientists and a member of the Arcade team, infrared radiation goes hand in hand with syncrotron radiation, and the already measured amount of the Milky Ways infrared radiation radiation is not on the same order of magnitude required to create that kind of roar. So already we can look at the Milky Way and saying, no,

you are not it. You're not the culprit alright, so we we slashed that one off the list. Um, you know. Dale Fixen also looked into the idea that the roar could be emanating from the very first stars that Arcade was actually looking for. Right, these first stars, thought to have formed about thirteen billion years ago, didn't have any dust. That's because the first dust in our universe was formed

within these very stars. So in theory, possibly these stars could have created a lot of synchrotron radiation without that correspondingly high amount of infrared radiation, which we would have theoretically already detected. So there's one possible loophole. But it's not an answer. Dubious about it, well, I mean, I'm I'm dubious about I trust Fixing on this. If he says that it's not a slam dunk, then I'm gonna

have to take his word for it. Wise, all right, what about other far flung galaxies, well, clusters of galaxies formed by gravitational murder of smaller clusters and subclusters. And we know from radio telescope observations that sometimes there's the presence of large regions of diffuse steep spectrum synchrotron emission and galaxies that emit more light at radio wavelengths than a visible wavelengths. These are known as radio allowed galaxy.

So there is this idea that there could be these radio allowed galaxies out there that could have created the space roar. However, cog art are a man at arcade says quote typical radio galaxies can't account for the noise, as you would need the entire universe filled of them to produce signal strengths this high six times higher than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe. Or, more specifically, as fix In puts it, you'd have to

pack them into the universe like sardines. There wouldn't be any space left between one galaxy universe. Not again, not an answer. Alright, Well, here's another theory, and this one I do want to preface is is out there, and it takes us a little more into the fringes of what we know and into some of the uh, the more complex and uh mind melting, mind melting theories regarding

our universe, in our place in the universe. American physicist David brown Um has a take on space war that plays into cellular automaton and in theory, Okay, cellular automaton is a whole area that we could we could easily spend a whole podcast on, So I'm gonna try and keep it short here, but uh, this basically, this model involves the use of colored or shaded cells on a grid that evolved through a number of discrete time steps according to a set of rules based on the states

of neighboring cells. So you may have seen footage of this. It plays into the game of life um experiment where it looks sort of like I guess they were digimon the sort of little primitive computerized things where you canna have like a little digitized pet. Kind of looks like that, except more abstract little dancing pixels. Uh. And essentially it's

a model of complexity. Uh. It allows uh scientists to observe complexity evolving, so that cellular automaton serves is a general model of complexity, a level of complexity that ultimately theoretically is on par with our entire universe. And you could argue that the complexity that we see in reality could essentially begin as a little program of dancing squares on a computer screen. Okay, if you're still with me, all right? If if you're still with me, that's that's

the first slab on the sandwich. We are in a computer simulation. That's where it often leads to, is this idea that you can think of in a way, you can think of reality as a as a computer simulation based on automaton. But the next layer on the sandwich is in theory, a branch of string theory that presents a model for the basic structure of the universe and

allows for the existence of additional universes. So Brown argues that in theory describes the sailor automaton, and it real photons are constantly leaving our universe to enter an alternate one. Uh and this would mean that over time, the scentage of real matter in our universe has decreased and the percentage of virtual matter or dark matter has increased. So this would mean there would have been more matter in

the early universe, meaning much more radio noise. And that is what Arcade is detecting when it gazes through space and time to those early stars. Okay, we are in a computer simulation, right, a leaky one, a leaky one. And as a result, uh, well, I should say. An indirect result of that is the space roar, which is really just uh maybe photons exchanging energy between other universes. Yeah, close, yeah,

pretty much. Yeah, we're in the matrix and and there's this big crashing sound in the in the in the distance, and that's pixels and programs being flushed out. Meanwhile, there's a there's dark matter flowing back in. It's all very drama, it is. It's very dramatic. And again it's it's an out there theory and it and it does not again solve our mystery. We're still left with this mystery of the space roar, and we may always be right. It may just be that we don't have the instruments that

are sensitive enough to pick up on whatever it is. Yeah, I mean it's it's kind of it's kind of the great Unknown, maybe, you know, giving us the finger a little bit, saying you think, yeah, say, you don't have it all, you don't have all the answers, and here I'm just gonna make a big loud raspberry noise at you and and leave you with that. Try and figure this out. Humans. So it's like a cosmic fart joke. Maybe maybe the biggest fart joke in the universe. You know,

I like the scatological chips. All right, Well, let's put the space war aside and let's call over the robot and do a couple of listener mail. All right, This one comes to us from Alex. Alex writes in and says, how my name is Alex. As part of my job, I tend to do a lot of driving, so podcasts like yours really keep me saying for that, I thank you, essentially. I just finished listening to your Mean World Syndrome episode and I thought I would add to it. Recently, a

game called blood Born was released. You can probably guess from the promo art, and he included this is a nice, dark, dreary image of some dude with horns on his helmet and weapons and a dreary sort of dark fantasy, grim dark fantasy setting. Yeah uh, he says you probably a guest from the promo art. It's not a pleasant, feel good game. Without giving any spoilers, the world the player is presented with is hopeless, desolate and oppressing. It's a

very good game. However, I found that after I played for long periods, I became very forlorn and quiet. I found myself feeling apathetic and even resentful towards the upcoming general election. I live in the UK. I've actually stopped playing, despite how good the game is, as a direct result of feeling so crappy straight after playing. Listening to your podcast just after noticing this was a great little coincidence and one I thought i'd share. Keep doing what you

guys are doing. I look forward to every single episode. You don't have to read this out. I just wanted to give you guys what I thought was a fresh perspective and example. Cool X, thanks for writing in about that. We also got some feed We got a lot of feedback from our episode of the Gordian Knot of Race. We expected to get a lot of feedback. We got confirmation of unconscious bias from listeners. We got some people saying that unconscious bias doesn't exist, and we're not too

happy that we covered it. I think we had at least one person say that they don't see race. We did, and uh so we thought we would share this one from Melissa. She says, and this came through Facebook. Says, I just finished listening to your podcast and the Gordian not of race. This is a topic that has always fascinated me, how something so seemingly inconsequential as how you

look could and does affect all areas of life. I thought you did a very good job of talking about unconscio a racial bias and how things woven into our culture can affect how we feel about a person, even if we don't know it. I took the test linked on the landing page for the podcast, and I thought the results were very interesting and much different than what I was expecting. For some background, I live in a very heavily wide area. There are very few minorities of

any race in my childhood as well as today. Best friend is mixed, black father, white mother. I love my friend dearly and I have very few early memories without her in them. We met at about age four or five, and as a result, I have very few memories that do not include her family. I expected that I would have a slight preference for white faces. She's talking about the I A T, which is the implicit association test

that she took. UH slight preference for white faces simply due to culture, cultural factors and what a white area I live in and grew up in. However, when the results came back, that came back as your data suggests little to automatic preference between African American and European American. This greatly surprised me and got me thinking. Could my lack of unconscious prejudice have something to do with my

best friend of so many years and her family? Could it be a reflection of how, having been exposed to them at such a young age, and caring so deeply for them, I developed the necessary empathy to get such a score. Could this mean that if more schools had a more even mix, or neighborhoods were not so prominently one race over the other, unconscious race preferences could go away as well. All rather abstract questions with no easy answers. I was just curious if you found any information about

this in your research. Keep up the great work. You are always a fun listen, Melissa. So thank you, Melissa that that's a excellent firsthand account of not only the results that you got on your test, but what your own experience m has been. Indeed, and if if anyone else wants to take the I A T you can either of course find it search or I've also we also included a link to it on the landing page

for the Gordian Knot of Race episode. Now, I'm not surprised that you know, at such a young age, with her experience with her friend who is a mixed race, that she would have those results, because I'm thinking back to the episode when we were talking about kids. I believe as young as seven begin to express unconscious bias um, so you can see how the positive side of that could be reflected, and that that's why I thought it was so great that she shared that with us, because

it is the positive side. Indeed, it's good to hear about the positive side of that point. Sody, you have it, We'll send the robot back to its chamber once more, and hey uh. In the meantime, you would like to check out more episodes of the podcast, If you want to check out blog pose, videos, links on to social media accounts, whatever, you can find it all at stuff to Blow your Mind at dot com. And if you have some thoughts you'd like to share with us, please

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