Scientists are trying to 'listen' to the Big Bang

[UM-Bot]

Gravitational waves are helping scientists to unravel the mystery of what happened when the universe began.

https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/348857/scientists-are-trying-to-listen-to-the-big-bang

[jethrofloyd]

Better to 'listen' to the Big Bang, than to watch 'The Big Bang Theory'.

[bison]

Detectors  of high frequency gravitational waves must be small, as explained in the article. It seems that it would be useful to operate many such detectors, and combine the signals from them, to make up for the small excursions that must be detected. The resulting signal should be substantially stronger.

[quiXilver]

Pure Awesome!

[Mr Guitar]

I really don't know much about cosmology, so can someone explain where all that plasma and misc particles came from in the first place? I've always had it in the back of my head that the singularity was just all the stuff from a former universe that got squeezed down so tight (mega black hole?) that it had to (for some unknown reason) explode and resulted in the stuff that became our current universe. Maybe the expanding universe concept sort of rules out that happening again and everything cools down and just dies away? If the singularity was something, it seems to me that the something must have had a place to reside before it went bang. Where or what was that residence? Maybe expansion stops at some point and everything starts going back together for a gazillion years to form another singularity then it all starts over again. But, again, what are the physical boundaries within which this all happens? What did the singularity exist in/or before it exploded? Maybe I'm not being very scientific here, but I like to keep things simple if at all possible.