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If we’d always had digital tellies we’d never have seen this phenomenon. But in the old days of analogue, TV had to pick up a wide range of frequencies, and this microwave echo of the Big Bang – gradually fading as it spreads through our ever-expanding universe – just happens to overlap into the same range, so our tellies were able to see it. Its proper name is Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR). It’s on the radio too, somewhere in all that white noise between stations.

CBR was found by a pair of American physicists in the 1960s. They were trying to listen to the stars and were getting increasingly irritated by a constant noise on their super-powerful receiver. At first they thought it might be caused by pigeon poo on their dish, but they had it cleaned and it was no different. Then they wondered if it could be radiation from nearby New York, but they pointed their dish the other way and it was still there. Eventually they found it wasn’t even coming from within the galaxy, but was present everywhere, throughout the universe. Then they looked at each other and realised what it must be. They had found what’s left of the heat from the Big Bang.