'I am Cosmos, Hear Me Roar'

"Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected"
Space.com (January 7, 2009)

"LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.

"The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.

"Of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can't very efficiently. But radio waves can...."

The astronomers had hoped to find faint indications of heat from the universe's earliest stars. What they got was static: a lot of it.

One of them, Michael Seiffert, isn't at all disappointed:

" 'This is what makes science so exciting,' Seiffert said. '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.' "