I read in the latest Harper’s Index that 1% of TV static from cosmic microwave background radiation, a result of the Big Bang. Is this accurate?
Also, what is the rest TV static composed of? And what is radio static composed of–is it the same/similar?
Finally, a hypothetical: If somehow all the radio signals from earth were turned off, what would we hear on the radio?
I believe about 4% of static is made up of the residual “Big Bang” radiation.
Look at isolated bits of statics first. Some is man made. Vacuum cleaners and such produce a lot of static for nearby receivers. In nature, lightning produces a huge amount of static. Listen to AM radio during a thunderstorm. Lots of bloshoorps. Other natural phenomena like auroras also generate a lot of static.
What makes static so “noisy” is that it’s not composed of just one frequency, modulated a bit, like regular man made radio waves. If you are a slave to the Fourier Transform, you see it as a sum of a lot of frequencies. Which is why it appears all over the place on the dial. There’s always a discernible pattern to the distribution of frequencies however, which tells you which band the source is going to most affect.
If all you are doing is listening to or viewing static, your mind is trying to “parse” the noise into something. Since there is no pattern, you really don’t hear/see anything. But the human mind is great at creating patterns where none exists, cf. “superstition”.
Now back to the real issue: aside from short lived stuff like lightning, where does static come from? Umm, it comes from short lived stuff like lightning. There’s a lot of all sorts of stuff going on all the time, mostly in the atmosphere, a wee bit from space, even the odd electrical “quake” from underneath. Each is short lived, but since they are happening all the time, you get continuous noise. A firecracker is a bit of noise. Millions of firecrackers going off every minute all day is continuous noise.