Question

[OU.04]In your own words, explain how background noise detected in space provides evidence for the Big Bang Theory.

Answer 1

What's the OU.04 reference all about .. ?
This sounds like the 4.2 kelvins background radiation which is said to be the sort of "cold embers" of a gigantically hugely enormous cosmological fireball that is claimed to be the big bang. A bit like a once very hot - billions of kelvins - furnace now the embers of it. I think I've heard of it as the "holmdean whisper". Physicists were looking for, possibly, something else when they scanned the sky, possibly with a 'scope which could show electromagnetic radiation, and up popped this persistent noise, at a frequency which represented a temperature of, well pretty low, 4.2 kelvins I think it was. Being low level and "background" it was called a "whisper", and I think it was first detected at "holmdean" probably somewhere in US.
The above is from my memory, so I can't abs guarantee its accuracy. But, it's quite an interesting question if you're a cosmologist or an astrophysicist.
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Answer 2

I think that some key words here are "black body radiation". It's electromagnetic radiation whose frequency/wavelength etc is a function of temperature. Hence you get expressions such as "red hot", "white hot", "blue hot" for the visible part of the overall "black body radiation spectrum". People like Rayleigh, Jeans and a few others were involved in this research. A lot of professors, and probably a few Nobel prizes, although no prize for Professor Hawking at Cambridge U, UK yet. Professor Sir Fred Hoyle got a UK knighthood for his "steady state" theory of the universe, which Hawking argued heatedly against. It seems that at one point the two protagonists were scientifically feathering at each other in the same room. I wasn't there, so I don't know but there was a biopic film dealing with Hawking's life, esp with his illness, and the feathering took place early in his career.