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In your area/country, did you have a word or phrase to describe the static white noise on a television set not tuned to a channel? (upload.wikimedia.org)

submitted 10 months ago by Rentlar to c/[email protected]

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Bonus points if there's a known onomatopoeia to describe the sound.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What caused this? Shit used to terrify me as a kid

[–] Rentlar 1 points 10 months ago

Essentially the TV just plays whatever data is there on that frequency band. When there is nothing on the channel, it picks up background radiation from space; cosmic gamma rays that just happened to have lengthened to the wavelengths that the TV happens to be playing on.