ESA

This all-sky map from the Planck probe charts the imprint of the big bang's cosmic afterglow.

The Planck cosmology probe has forced scientists to revise their estimates of the universe's age and the cosmic balance of matter and dark energy — and now it's led a physicist to remix the sound of the big bang as well.

The new big-bang sound was created over the weekend by John Cramer, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Washington. The audio file follows up on Cramer's decade-old audio rendition of the big bang, which was based on data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP.

Planck and WMAP both charted subtle variations in the all-sky cosmic microwave background, a super-faint glow of stretched-out radiation from a time when the universe was 380,000 years old. The variations amount to mere millionths of a degree in temperature, but they record the imprint of fluctuations left behind by the big bang.

Cramer released his original WMAP big-bang sound 10 years ago, but the Planck readings were so much better that a remix was in order.

"The new frequency spectrum goes to much higher frequencies than did the WMAP analysis, and therefore offers a more 'high-fidelity' rendition of the Sound of the Big Bang," Cramer explained on a Web page providing the updated sound files. We're featuring the 20-second version, but you can download versions that play out for as long as 500 seconds.

"I recommend the 100-second version, but you can choose for yourself," Cramer said.

The sound follows the curves in Planck data to reflect the propagation of pressure waves through the medium of the early universe during the first 760,000 years of its evolution. The time scale has been speeded up astronomically, of course, and Cramer figures that the frequency has been scaled up by a factor of 100 septillion (that's a 1 followed by 26 zeroes).

"The actual Big Bang frequencies, which had wavelengths on the order of a fraction of the size of the universe, were far too low to be heard by humans (even had any been around)," Cramer explained.

Ten years ago, Cramer said that when he played the sound of the WMAP data on his computer, his dogs pricked up their ears and listened attentively. "There was less reaction from the dogs this time, but there was some barking when the big bang sound initially came on," Cramer told NBC News in an email.

Sharp-eared listeners with a good sound system will notice that the Planck remix doesn't rattle the speakers as much as the WMAP original does. "The big bang sound is different because of the higher frequency components from Planck, and because I decided to shift the frequency scale factor to make less bass (since not everyone has a sub-woofer on their PC)," Cramer said.

In addition to the big-bang sound, Cramer has several unorthodox claims to scientific fame, including his long-running column for Analog magazine; his science-fiction novels, "Twistor" and "Einstein's Bridge"; and his experiment to find out whether quantum mechanics would allow for backward causality.

Cramer said his retrocausality experiment is currently in limbo. He has always said that there might be some subtle quantum effect that would rule out backward causality, and so far that's been the case.

"The Mark II version of the retrocausality experiment has concluded for now, defeated by detector noise," he said in his email. "I'm currently in the process of writing a new pre-proposal (to a government organization I won't name) seeking funding for a Mark III version of the experiment.  It would use noise-free superconducting-transition single photon detectors instead of the too-noisy avalanche photodiodes, would be down-scaled in wavelength a bit so that the entangled photon pairs would be at wavelengths matching the communication industry standard wavelengths for fiber optics, and would use two switched single-mode fiber optic Mach-Zehnder interferometers instead of lenses, prisms and mirrors on an optics table.  Said organization is interested because there is the possibility of zero-time-delay communication with distant space missions."

Read that last sentence again: Someone in the government is interested in zero-time-delay communication with distant space missions. Albert Einstein's theories suggest that information can't be transmitted any faster than the speed of light, but Einstein himself said quantum mechanics might open the door for "spooky action at a distance." Zero-time-delay communication certainly sounds spooky — but is it possible? Stay tuned.

Scott Eklund / Seattle P-I file

University of Washington physicist John Cramer, seen here in a 2007 photo, has been working on a laser experiment to test whether causality can work backward in time.

More weird physics:

• Math twisted for faster-than-light travel
• Bizarre quantum physics may play role in life
• New view: Big bang was a big crystallization

Audio clips: Copyright 2013 John G. Cramer.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

M. Kornmesser / ESO

This artist's impression shows galaxies at a time less than a billion years after the big bang, when the Universe was still partially filled with hydrogen fog that absorbed ultraviolet light. New observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope are probing this phase of the early universe by studying the light from some of the most distant galaxies ever detected.

Two studies shed additional light on a murky question: How did the cosmic fog that enveloped the universe in its early days dissipate?

In one study, researchers suggest that whatever happened, happened quickly ... and they say it probably had to do with the hot blast of the first generation of stars. Another suggests how the fog-blasting mechanism worked ... and why it might be tricky to see the effect.

First, about that cosmic fog: Cosmologists have worked out a model for the development of the early cosmos that's a good match for their observations, and the model indicates that for the first few hundred thousand years of its existence, the universe consisted of a hot, murky stew of subatomic particles.

About 400,000 years after the big bang, things had cooled down enough for electrons and protons to come together and form a fog of neutral hydrogen gas. This marked a period that astronomers call the "Dark Ages." Eventually, gravity did its magic, and clouds of hydrogen coalesced to create the first stars and galaxies. The remaining hydrogen became electrically charged — "reionized," in geek-speak — and was cleared away.

Today, astronomers can see only as far back as the period of reionization, even if they're using the most powerful telescopes in the world. The best they can do is observe what was happening to galaxies while the reionization was taking place. And that's exactly what astronomers did during a three-year survey that's described in a research paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Timeline of the early universe
"Archaeologists can reconstruct a timeline of the past from the artifacts they find in different layers of soil. Astronomers can go one better: We can look directly into the remote past and observe the faint light from different galaxies in cosmic evolution," the project's leader, Adriano Fontana of INAF Rome Astronomical Observatory, said today in a news release from the European Southern Observatory. "The differences between the galaxies tell us about the changing conditions in the universe over this important period, and how quickly these changes were occurring."

The team conducted their survey using the ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Astronomers identified five extremely faraway galaxies, based on their redshift, and placed them in a timeline that started at 780 million years after the big bang (which is thought to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago) and ended about a billion years after the big bang. They also measured how much of the galaxies' ultraviolet light was absorbed by the hydrogen fog surrounding the galaxies.

The paper's lead author, Laura Pentericci of INAF Rome Astronomical Observatory, said there was a "dramatic difference" in the amount of light blocked by the oldest vs. the youngest galaxies in the sample.

"When the universe was only 780 million years old, this neutral hydrogen was quite abundant, filling from 10 to 50 percent of the universe's volume," she said in the news release. "But only 200 million years later, the amount of neutral hydrogen had dropped to a very low level, similar to what we see today. It seems that reionization must have happened quicker than astronomers previously thought."

The findings also favor a particular hypothesis for the mechanism behind the reionization. Some theorists say the fog was cleared by radiation blazing forth from the first generation of stars, while others point to the intense radiation given off as matter falls toward black holes.

"The detailed analysis of the faint light from two of the most distant galaxies we found suggsts that the very first generation of stars may have contributed to the energy output observed," said another member of the research team, Eros Vanzella of the INAF Trieste Observatory. "These would have been very young and massive stars, about 5,000 times younger and 100 times more massive than the sun, and they may have been able to dissolve the primordial fog and make it transparent."

Confirming or disproving that hypothesis would require further observations, either from space telescopes or from better ground-based instruments such as the ESO's planned European Extremely Large Telescope.

Jordan Zastrow / Univ. of Mich.

In this three-color image of the dwarf starburst galaxy NGC 5253, green corresponds to starlight. The yellow shows the gas that is being lit up by the starburst at the galaxy's core. The red shows where ultraviolet light from massive stars is evaporating gas, exposing the central starburst along a narrow cone.

Building the case for blazing stars
Another study, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, provides further support for the blazing-star hypothesis. Astronomers observed a dwarf starburst galaxy known as NGC 5253, about 11 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, using the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

NGC 5253 is nowhere near as old as the galaxies that the Italian researchers surveyed, but it does provide a clearer, closer-up view of the phenomenon that might have been at work during the reionization period. "This galaxy is nearby, but we're trying to use it to better understand what was going on in the early universe," the study's lead author, Jordan Zastrow of the University of Michigan, told me.

When Zastrow and her colleagues used special filters to analyze the light from the galaxy, they determined that extreme ultraviolet radiation was blasting out of the galaxy's center and causing hydrogen gas in the interstellar medium to dissipate. "We are not directly seeing the ultraviolet light," Zastrow emphasized in a news release. "We are seeing its signature in the gas around the galaxy."

The signature of the blast shows up in the team's color-coded picture of NGC 5253 as a reddish-yellow tail snaking out toward the lower left corner of the frame. "It appears to be happening over a very narrow region, a very narrow cone," Zastrow said.

The gas within such a galaxy would normally absorb the ultraviolet radiation, but the researchers suggest that superwinds from the galaxy's massive stars helped clear a passageway through the galactic gas, letting more of the light break through.

Starburst galaxies are rarely found in the nearby universe, but they're thought to have been very common in the early universe. NGC 5253 just might be showing astronomers a rerun of the gas-clearing process that marked the age of ionization. But the galaxy is also showing astronomers why it's been hard to see similar processes at work in other galaxies.

"The opening that is letting the UV light out is very small, which makes this light challenging to detect," Zastrow said. "We can think of it as a lighthouse. If the lamp is pointed toward you, you can see the light. If it's pointed away from you, you can't see it. We believe the orientation of the galaxy is important as to whether we can detect escaping UV radiation."

Astronomers might want to take this narrow-beam effect into account as they build their scenarios for how the cosmic fog cleared, Zastrow told me. "Particularly because this issue is so interesting, and so important for our cosmic history, the important thing is to better understand what is actually possible in terms of learning how it could have happened," she said.

More about cosmic frontiers:

• Scientists pinpoint the farthest galaxy
• Hubble spots farthest galaxy ... again
• Galactic births came early
• Scientists learn how galaxies grew up

In addition to Pentericci, Fontana and Vanzella, authors of "Spectroscopic Confirmation of Z~7 LBGs: Probing the Earliest Galaxies and the Epoch of Reionization" include M. Castellaon, A. Grazian, M. Dijkstra, K. Boutsia, S. Cristiani, M. Dickinson, E. Giallongo, M. Giavalisco, R. Maiolino, A. Moorwood and P. Santini.

In addition to Zastrow, authors of "An Ionization Cone in the Dwarf Starburst Galaxy NGC 5253" include M.S. Oey, Sylvain Veilleux, Michael McDonald and Crystal L. Martin.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

CEA

A worker wearing a hardhat is dwarfed by the ALICE detector's red magnet assembly in the Large Hadron Collider.

The world's biggest particle collider has switched over from shooting beams of protons to shooting heavy ions -- leading to experiments that could cook up the kind of "soup" produced by the big bang. And even before those experiments have begun, critics have cooked up a fresh batch of doomsday talk as well.

For the past year, the Large Hadron Collider has been smashing protons together at progressively higher energies, 300 feet (100 meters) below ground at the French-Swiss border, in a ring-shaped tunnel that measures 17 miles (27 kilometers) around. A milestone was reached last month when the beams' luminosity hit its target for the year.

"This shows that the objective we set ourselves for this year was realistic, but tough, and it's very gratifying to see it achieved in such fine style," Rolf Heuer, director general for Europe's CERN particle physics center, said in a news release issued today. "It's a testimony to the excellent design of the machine as well as the hard work that has gone into making it succeed."

High-energy proton collisions could unlock the secrets of higher dimensions, or reveal the nature of dark matter and antimatter, or point to an as-yet-undetected field that is thought to give some particles mass while leaving other particles massless. The particle associated with this field is called the Higgs boson, sometimes known as the "God particle."

But when it comes to creating the conditions that existed just after the big bang, the LHC needs heavier ammo. That's why CERN has switched from protons to lead ions -- that is, lead atoms that have been stripped of their electrons. The ions are more than 200 times heavier than protons, and when they're smashed into each other at nearly the speed of light, the blast is expected to shatter particles into a hot soup of free-flying quarks and gluons.

Current theory suggests that the whole universe existed as a dollop of super-hot quark-gluon plasma in the first few millionths of a second after the big bang. Since then, quarks have been virtually impossible to pull apart -- but an ion-smasher in New York, known as the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider or RHIC, is thought to have done it five years ago. Such experiments help physicists understand exactly how the universe was, and is, put together.

CERN says the LHC should be able to collide heavy ions with energy levels 28 times higher than those achieved at RHIC. Some theorists have suggested that at those energies, the big bang soup would no longer exist as a liquid, but as a gas. And so, for the next few weeks, the LHC's spotlight will turn to a huge detector called ALICE (which stands for "A Large Ion Collider Experiment").

More than 1,000 physicists, engineers and technicians are on the ALICE team, but they're able to take data only during the four weeks of the year that precede the LHC's winter break. So they didn't waste any time getting started. The proton-on-proton action finished up this morning, and the first test beam of lead ions made 75 laps around the LHC tunnel tonight, CERN spokesman James Gillies told me.

"It's going well," Gillies said. "We're looking at the first collisions in the next few days."

Two other detectors at the LHC, the Compact Muon Solenoid and ATLAS, will also be taking data during the heavy-ion run. Then the beams will be turned off for maintenance during the winter break. The schedule calls for proton beams to start up again in February, Gillies said.

CERN physicist Detlef Kuchler holds a piece of the lead source material used to create heavy ions for the LHC.

Return of the strangelets
This week's heavy-ion switch is good news for physicists at the LHC ... but it has also sparked a renewed campaign by folks who worry that the collisions will destroy the world. Remember them? Before the LHC's startup in 2008, some critics voiced concerns that high-energy collisions could give rise to catastrophic phenomena ranging from globe-gobbling black holes to atom-wrecking particles. Similar objections were raised about RHIC, and in response, CERN conducted a series of safety reviews that concluded LHC operations would be safe. The critics were unsatisfied, however. With the switch to heavy ions, they're shifting their focus from the black-hole scenario to the atom-wrecking scenario.

A group called Heavy Ion Alert claims that the LHC could create a dangerous breed of strangelet -- that is, a never-before-seen combination of quarks that includes some with a strange flavor. In this case, "strange" is a technical term, representing one of the six flavors of quarks. (The others are up, down, charm, bottom and top.) The claim is that just the wrong kind of strangelet could turn nearby atoms into strangelets as well, setting off a catastrophic chain reaction.

The case for killer strangelets is similar to the case for globe-gobbling microscopic black holes. If there's any chance at all that the LHC could produce an Earth-killer, the experiment should not be done. "For Earth, one [chance] in 1,000, or one in 100,000 is still something you don't want to do," James Blodgett, a member of the group, told me this week.

The reassurances from particle physicists follow a similar format as well. The most recent LHC safety report says theory as well as observations would rule out such a catastrophe. If such strangelets could arise, they would have been observed beyond Earth, where there are cosmic-ray collisions far more powerful than anything the LHC can dish out. The report's authors say it's theoretically harder to create the dangerous kind of strangelets at higher energies -- which means that if anything bad could happen, it would have happened at RHIC.

"For this reason, the likelihood of strangelet production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions can be compared to the likelihood of producing an ice cube in a furnace," the authors write.

'A teachable moment'
The LHC's critics point to earlier reports from researchers, speculating on the prospects for producing stable, negatively charged strangelets -- the supposedly scary kind. They cite this as evidence that "CERN has misled the public." But some of those reports date back 15 years or so and don't reflect the latest thinking about the production of exotic matter.

Other reports are more recent, but refer to what might be found using a subdetector known as CASTOR. The CASTOR researchers themselves voice no concern about a catastrophe. Instead, they see their experiment as a straightforward effort to find evidence of exotic phenomena previously associated with cosmic-ray collisions, including centauros and strangelets. The doomsday connection is being made by the doomsayers themselves ... plus maybe a few physicists exercising their imagination.

A newly published book about the quest for the Higgs boson, titled "Massive," devotes an entire chapter to the strangelet controversy, recounting how it grew out of a speculative comment that Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek made in an 1999 magazine article. "I thought I'd use the opportunity as a teachable moment," the book's author, Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample, quotes Wilczek as saying.

At the time, Wilczek didn't realize his strange speculation would set off a years-long debate. And even if the hubbub over strangelets settles down over the next few weeks, that's unlikely to end worries about the end of the world. Here's how Sample puts it in "Massive":

"History suggests there will always be some world-ending entity lurking among scientists' theories, and the chances of unleashing it by accident will almost certainly be shrouded in uncertainty. If dangerous strangelets and magnetic monopoles are ever ruled out, another possibility will emerge from physicists' theories. How then should society decide whether an experiment that has a minute risk of causing total disaster be carried out? In the distant past, the consequences of an experiment gone wrong affected only those involved or nearby. One argument says that, since particle colliders are primarily of direct benefit only to pure science, we have already come too far. But that is short-sighted. High-energy physics experiments have brought us revolutionary technologies as disparate as the World Wide Web and ion beams for cancer treatment. When we make progress in pure science, technological benefits often follow. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a truly open and public debate in which real risks are laid out. Without that, society as a whole has no chance of making an informed decision. How we achieve this will only become a more pressing issue as science advances."

What do you think? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 4:20 p.m. ET Nov. 5: More than two years ago, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit that sought a halt in operations at the LHC due to concerns about strangelets, black holes and other doomsday scenarios -- but the plaintiffs (Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho) have nevertheless been keeping the case alive on appeal. Richard Penner, who has been following the appeal process closely, reports that judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the plaintiffs' request for a rehearing today.

I've also heard back from a couple of the physicists involved in developing the CASTOR detector -- Edwin Norbeck and Yasar Onel -- and they say they don't expect any dangerous strangelets to be created by the LHC. In fact, they don't expect to see any strangelets at all, even though that's one of the phenomena that the detector was designed to spot. Since the original papers about CASTOR came out, experiments at RHIC have led physicists in a different direction. "The theoreticians are changing their minds," Onel told me.

CASTOR's goal, however, is the same: What is behind these anomalous cosmic-ray events known as centauros? Maybe they're caused by hypernuclei ... or maybe it's some other phenomenon at work. "Nobody knows what they really are," Norbeck told me. "They're not strangelets. [CASTOR] is prepared to look at these unusual cosmic-ray events, whatever their cause is."

More from MSNBC:

• Special report on "The Big Bang Machine"
• Nightmares and dreams at the LHC
• What's a hadron? Tour the particle zoo

More from the Web:

• CERN: The safety of the LHC
• CMS Times: Looking forward with CASTOR
• APS: Looking for strangelets ... and not finding them

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.