Hi! My story's set on a spaceship (in the future) with some very space-savvy characters, so I'm trying to get my astronomy as accurate as possible. I tried doing some google scholar searches but couldn't figure out, is the "space roar" caused by the CMB, something else, or is it still a total mystery? Thank you!
Space is weird.I mean it. There’s no ‘but’ or ‘and’ after that phrase. Indeed, the more we learn, the weirder it gets. Isn’t that right, Dr Haldane?
Dr. Haldane said that in his book Possible Worlds and Other Papers, published in 1927. In the last hundred years, we’ve seen that he’s quite correct.
The Space Roar (yeah, I capitalize it) is one of those things that are much weirder than we can suppose. For those who don’t know about the Space Roar, that’s okay. No one knew about it until 2009.
NASA sent up a radio wave detector attached to a high-altitude balloon. It’s mission was to get above the atmosphere (which blocks a lot of radio frequencies) and listen to the faint radio waves emitted by ancient stars.
What it found was that the universe was much louder in the radio signals than anyone expected - like six times louder than our models of the universe expected. The place is just lousy with radio energy.
And we have no idea why.
Is it part of the cosmic microwave background that we didn’t know about before? A type of energetic astronomical phenomenon that we’ve never seen? Leakage into our universe from other universes or some type of hyperspace dimension? The universe ate something that disagreed with it and it burped?
Or something even weirder? It could be almost anything.
Almost any reason for it, if presented well in a story, are quite plausible. It’s still a mystery, and probably will remain one for quite a while.
Of course, investigating the Space Roar is also a great reason for a starship crew to be jaunting off into the unknown.