Ok, so I appreciate that not many of the younger generation will appreciate that analogue TV was once a thing. Trust me, digital is better.
For those of us who do remember it though, one of the things you will no doubt ‘fondly’ recall is the static or ‘snowy’ screen – what NASA refers to as the ‘in-between channel’.
It turns out that there is actually a pretty cool reason behind that static.
Around 13.8 billion years ago there was, according to most theories, a singularity that erupted in space causing a bang. A big one. This ‘Big Bang’ resulted in a massive sudden (relatively speaking) inflation of energy in the form of microwaves that, over time, charged different particles which interacted with each other resulting in the formation of galaxies and planets. The energy emitted from the Big Bang is still detectable through infrared telescopes today and is known as the cosmic microwave background.
So if you do still have an analogue TV you can tune to an ‘in-between channel’ and the static you see on your screen is, in part, the afterglow of the Big Bang.
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