Freaky Fridays-Issue # 2

What IS It? Mystery Noise in Space

It's very, very far away, but astronomers have detected what is essentially a noise that is so loud coming from outer space that it can only be described as a roar.

And they have no idea what is causing it!!

Space.com reports that the strange cosmic sound is booming six times louder than expected. Since sound waves can't travel well in the vacuum that is space, the sound must be a radio wave. Lots of objects in space--from stars to quasars and even our own Milky Way--emit radio waves. But this sound is different. There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland told his colleagues gathered at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California.

How did they find this? By accident. Kogut lead a team that was using a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics and Diffuse Emission) to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars. The instrument was launched in July 2006 from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet.
But instead of finding what they set out to find, astronomers heard this roaring sound. "The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut told Space.com. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted."

What IS it? They don't know, but they have managed to figure out what it is NOT. It's not primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy. And it's not other radio galaxies because there aren't enough of them.

Whatever it is remains a mystery, and it's obscuring the signal they want to receive from the earliest stars in the cosmos. "This is what makes science so exciting," team member Michael Seiffert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California told Space.com. "You start out on a path to measure something--in this case, the heat from the very first stars--but run into something else entirely, some unexplained."