By Ron Cowen
LONG BEACH, Calif. — When astronomers launched a balloon-borne experiment from Palestine, Texas three summers ago, they expected to find a faint radio signal from the slight warming of interstellar space by an early generation of stars. Instead, Al Kogut of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and his colleagues discovered a booming, uniformly distributed radio noise six times louder than anyone had predicted.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/9486.jpg?resize=300%2C222&ssl=1)
The team described the mysterious and pervasive radio static January 7 at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society. They also posted four reports online detailing their analyses and interpretation of the data at http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0562, http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0559, http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0555 and http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0546.
The researchers calculate that the radio noise is much too large to be accounted for by the combined emissions of all the galaxies in the universe that emit radio waves. They also suggest that the static could be signals generated by the first supermassive black holes. Cosmologist David Spergel of Princeton University, not a member of the discovery team, says the static could also be from the first generation of stars. “And those are the most conservative explanations,” he adds.