By Ron Cowen
Two teams of astronomers have for the first time detected the surviving notes of a cosmic symphony created just after the Big Bang, when the universe was a foggy soup of matter and radiation. The discoverers say that the survival of the acoustic imprint from this early epoch, 13.7 billion years ago, provides compelling new evidence that the blueprint for the present distribution of galaxies was set at the time of the Big Bang by random subatomic fluctuations.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2005/01/4730.jpg?resize=300%2C193&ssl=1)
In 1999, researchers detected a specific pattern of acoustic oscillations in the faint, ancient whisper of radiation—the cosmic microwave background—left over from the Big Bang. This week, Shaun Cole of the University of Durham in England and his colleagues announced that they had discerned remnants of that pattern while analyzing data from the Two-Degree Field Redshift Gravity Survey, a large-scale analysis of 220,000 galaxies. The map covers one-twentieth the area of the sky out to a distance of 2 billion light-years from Earth.