 Our universe began with a singularity that exploded, some 15-17 billion years ago. The explosion created space and time as we know it; some of the expanding energy from this 'Big Bang' became mass, mostly hydrogen and helium, fused by the billion degree temperatures that existed following the explosion. An astrophysicist named George Gamow postulated in the 1940's that if you looked deep enough into space, (about 99% of the way back to the beginning) you would be looking backwards in time, and should be able to see some left-over radiation from this original explosion that created our universe. The great time and distances involved, over 140,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km, or more than 14.7 billion light years, would have converted the radiation into lower energy microwaves. Two radio astronomers named Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found this microwave radiation in 1965, quite by accident. For this accomplishment they received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978. This cosmic background radiation is all that is left over from the original explosion that created our universe. It can be heard as a hiss by listening to speakers hooked up to a radio telescope ... that's how Penzias and Wilson originally discovered it. But you can see a visualization of this energy by tuning your television to an unused channel. About 1% of the static you see on the screen is caused by radiation left over from the Big Bang. What you are seeing is the birth of the universe!
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