Looking up at the glittering stars in the night sky I imagine a place of peaceful serenity. But a team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected. I wonder– Is it a Star Trek echo”Space the final frontier!”? or could it be God using a giant vacumn cleaner on all that space dust?  Perhaps it is the Martian Super Bowl?  This roar is from a distant cosmos and nobody, here on earth anyway, know what causes it. Sound waves cannot travel in a vacuum or at least not very well but radio waves can. Radio waves are not soundwaves, but they are still electromagnetic waves situated on the low frequency end of the light spectrum.Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves.

Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky). Space’s radiator about to explode?  Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss. But the newly detected signal, described at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society is far louder than astronmers expected.There is “something new and interesting going on in the universe,” said Alan Kogut of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a ballon borne insturment named ARCADE(absolute radiometer for cosmology, astrophysics, and diffuse emission) In July 2006 the instrument was launched from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space. ARCADE’s mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar form distant reaches of the universe. “The universe really threw us a curve,” Kogut said. “Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted.” Detailed analysis ruled out primordial stars and radio sources including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy. At least it wasn’t a giant burp!! Other radio galaxies also can’t account for the noise–there are not enough of them–”you’d have to pack them into the universe like sardines,” (Picture that!) one study member Dale Fixsen said, “there wouldn’t be any space left between one galaxy and the next.”