geekosystem

It's a well known fact that children ask the best questions about science. For evidence of this, you need look no further than a question posed by an 11-year-old to physicist John Cramer almost a decade ago: Is there any recording of the sound of the Big Bang? The question got Cramer wondering if he could recreate an approximation of the sound of the Big Bang, so that's just what he did. Using data about the background radiation levels of the universe and translating those heat levels to sound waves, Cramer offered the first approximation of the sound that would have rung throughout the newborn universe in the millennia following the Big Bang. Now, thanks to new data from the Planck telescope, Cramer has been able to remaster the original sounds of the universe into a high-fidelity special edition, and you can take a listen below.

Physicists at the University of Melbourne have proposed a new way of looking at the origins of our universe, suggesting that everything that is came not from a Big Bang, but a Big Chill. The team, led by researcher James Quach, suggests that rather than a highly compressed universe exploding outwards in a huge release of energy, the universe as we know it instead coalesced from amorphous energy into its current crystallized form, like water freezing into ice.

As far as our understanding of the universe goes, everything started with the big bang which jump started existence. However, only the three lightest elements -- hydrogen, helium, and lithium -- were  produced during the big bang itself and all the rest were formed in the nuclear furnaces within stars. Scientists had theorized that somewhere in the universe, untouched pockets of the very first elements should still exist undiluted by heavier elements. Now, astronomers think they've found two such pristine gas clouds some 12 billion light years away in the constellations Leo and Ursa Major.

Those of us in the general public like to think of the Big Bang as the beginning of everything; in the beginning, there was nothing, then there was the Big Bang. But new theories of the Universe's creation suggest that not only is this not the case, and might suggest that a special class of black holes in this Universe are actually older than the Big Bang. I'll give you a minute to take that in.