The Universe

Male narrator: In the beginning, there was darkness,

and then, bang,

giving birth to an endless expanding existence

of time, space, and matter.

Every day, new discoveries are unlocking the mysterious,

the mind-blowing, the deadly secrets

of a place we call The Universe.

In the deep nothingness of space,

the cosmic silence is broken.

- Space is actually kind of a noisy place.

Narrator: Galaxies, stars, planets, and moons sing out

with strange and alien music.

- They sound a little bit like an alien fax.

Narrator: Now the cosmic playlist

in a top ten countdown,

the greatest hits of the universe...

in a symphony of alien sounds.

The.Universe.S07E02.DVDRip.XviD-FFNDVD English SRT Subtitles - UF (v1.00)

As the promo line for Ridley Scott's

science-fiction film Alien,

it was designed to send chills down your spine.

It's based on the unsettling idea

that space is a vacuum,

and sounds, whether screams, shouts, or songs,

can't travel in a vacuum.

But is that really true?

- Well, it's kind of narrow to think that, in space,

you can't hear anyone scream, because, in fact, here on Earth,

there are lots of sounds we can't hear.

They're either too high a pitch or too low a pitch.

Moreover, space isn't completely empty.

And then finally, you know, what's the definition of space?

If I'm an astronaut on the surface of Mars

and I have a spacesuit on, am I in space, or am I not?

Well, I would think I am.

- Okay, let's try right over here.

Narrator: Back on Earth,

Bruce Betts of The Planetary Society

in Pasadena, Oalifornia,

has given a lot of thought to Mars

and the subject of sound.

He's programmed his computer

with what he calls the "Marsinator"

to demonstrate what his voice would sound like

in the cold, carbon-dioxide atmosphere of Mars...

without those space suits.

- The atmosphere of Mars would actually change your voice

so it sounded deeper.

So let's go ahead and simulate that using the Marsinator,

and I will record my voice,

and then we will shift it

to what it would sound like on Mars.

This is what I'd sound like on Mars,

although I'd be wishing I had some oxygen to breathe.

Then I go ahead and process it, put it through the Marsinator.

And then we play it back and see what it sounds like.

This is how I would sound on Mars,

although I'd be wishing I had some oxygen to breathe.

Narrator: Of course, if humans ever do make it to Mars,

we will not hear their voices through the atmosphere.

Instead, we'll get them via radio waves...

the way many of our most important sounds

already reach us.

Yes.

- We're familiar with thinking of sound as something

that comes through the air to us,

just like we hear each other when we're talking,

but, in fact, a lot of the sounds that we hear

are transmitted through electromagnetic signals.

For example, your television actually transmits

a television signal into sound that you can hear.

- Who's our first contestant tonight?

Narrator: Sound in the cosmos

will never reach us directly across empty space,

so radio, light, or other electromagnetic waves

are the inevitable carriers,

bringing us a universe we can hear...

in all its variety.

- Space is actually kind of a noisy place.

It has many, many sources of noise

that we are able to detect

with special radio telescopes, for example.

Narrator: These alien sounds

make up an incredible collection-

the ultimate playlist.

We've polled our expert panel of scientists, astronomers,

and physicists to rank the top ten-

the greatest sounds from the expanse of space...

ending with a number one that will surprise us all.

And now the countdown starts.

Ooming in at number ten,

ringing out from a distance of 13 billion light-years,

the birth cry of the universe in a hit called

"The Audio Afterglow of the Big Bang."

- It's remarkable that the young universe

actually made a sound,

and the reason we know that is that we can actually witness

the glowing gases that were present at that time.

Narrator: The glow from these gases

is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation,

or OMBR.

It is a faint trace of microwaves

that stretches across every point in the sky.

Discovered by scientists in the mid-1960s,

the radiation is the afterglow of the big bang.

The famous blotchy satellite map of the OMBR

represents the cosmos in its infancy,

when it was only 380,000 years old.

When we look at the OMBR map,

we're essentially looking at a voice print

of the early universe,

because those tiny variations in color

correspond to variations in temperature,

and those correspond to variations

in density and pressure.

Well, pressure waves are just sound waves.

So we're seeing little variations in pressure,

little sound waves in the early universe.

Narrator: To understand the audio afterglow

of the big bang,

we need to know how the early universe

varied its pressures to generate sound waves.

To find out, astronomer Mark Whittle

and organ builder Manuel Rosales

visit the magnificent pipe organ

at Olaremont United Ohurch of Ohrist in Oalifornia.

In a way, the 4,000 pipes in this organ are comparable

to the voice of the early universe.

- Manuel, the amazing thing about the early universe is that

all its pipes were sounding together,

and it would be lovely if we could just try that

with this organ.

So do you think we could do that now,

play all the notes at once?

- Yes, let's pull out all the stops and try it.

- Ah, that's where that phrase comes from.

- Yes. - Okay, let's go.

Very powerful, but really hissy white noise kind of sound,

but an even more remarkable thing about the primordial sound

is that, in fact, a few particular tones

were present and were stronger at any given time.

Narrator: This is the opening

"The Audio Afterglow of the Big Bang."

A computer sound analyzer reveals its strong tones

as distinct columns on a color-coded graph.

As hissy as the early cosmic sound is,

it differs from pure white noise...

which has no organized features at all on the analyzer.

The sound of the audio afterglow, on the other hand,

comes through with a vaguely musical quality.

The pipes of this, or any organ, are made of wood and metal,

but the pipes of the early universe

were pits of dark matter,

the mysterious substance whose existence is known

only from its gravity.

- What drives the sound waves is gravity.

So, for example, if there's a region

of slightly higher density of dark matter,

there's a gravitational force pulling in.

Gas that's surrounding this region feels that pull,

and it falls in.

But it's gas, so it also- as it falls in, it compresses.

That compression acts like a spring,

and so it pushes the gas back out.

But then it overshoots until it falls back in again.

This is how the motion of the gas falls in, bounces out,

falls in, bounces out.

So we have an oscillating pressure wave, a sound wave.

Narrator: The cosmic background radiation,

as important as it is, is just a still picture.

Its imprint of sound has the effect

of no more than one noisy, barely musical note.

And even hearing that is a struggle.

The pipe organ helps show us why.

# MUSIC #

- The sounds of the universe are way too low for us to hear.

In fact, what's the lowest note that this organ plays?

It is a pipe 32 feet long,

and it can only be played with one's foot.

Yeah, that's pretty deep.

32 feet were nothing compared to the cosmic organ pipes.

They were between 20,000 and 400,000 light-years across.

- Sorry, we don't have any pipes quite that long.

No.

Narrator: The deep sound of the early universe is so low,

we can hear it only after a massive shift upward.

The background radiation of the universe

dates from 380,000 years after its creation.

But what happened before that?

Is it possible to uncover the whole song of the universe

from the very instant of the big bang?

The cosmos is filled with a symphony of alien sounds,

and we're counting down the top ten

of the universe's greatest hits.

Number ten on the playlist sings out

with the earliest tones of the universe

from "The Audio Afterglow of the Big Bang."

But our download of the universe's birth song

has some problems.

With the cosmic organ playing all its pipes at once,