"Cecil Moore" wrote in message
t...

snip

I just heard
on The Discovery Channel that a certain percentage of the
static we hear is left over from the Big Bang that happened
some 12.5 billion years ago.

Yes and no. There certainly is something termed galactic noise and most of
it has apparently been ricocheting around the cosmos all this time. It was
first discovered by Bell Labs scientists using a supercooled microwave
amplifier whose noise was higher than expected. They covered the feedhorn
and lo! ... The noise dropped!

http://www.amsat.org/amsat/archive/a.../msg00336.html retells
part of the story.

There's no way any of us will be affected by galactic background, however,
We'd need a system noise temperature better than 3K (That's 3 Kelvin, not
3,000) to detect it. The best consumer LNA's are way noisier. BTW, some
parts of the sky are "hotter" than this background level; if we use a low
noise TVRO dish system, we could detect a few star clusters. Of course the
sun and the moon can be detected.