In March, scientists announced the discovery of gravitational waves and evidence for the
Big Bang!
Today...
well, they're not so sure.
Hello everyone, I'm Ian O'Neill, space producer for Discovery News, and, like many of our
viewers, I'm a little confused.
You may remember the video when Trace and I got very excited about gravitational waves
embedded in the cosmic microwave background radiation, known simply as the "CMB".
We even sacrificed a whole pack of balloons to help explain this historic discovery!
But now the team of researchers have urged caution about their original announcement
after other space scientists began doubting their conclusions.
It's thought the CMB is the weak echo of the Big Bang that happened nearly 14 billion years
ago.
Using a telescope located at the South Pole called BICEP2, the researchers concluded that
they were indeed looking at the signature of gravitational waves.
This discovery proved the inflationary model of the Big Bang and even provided possible
evidence for quantum gravity.
These are all amazing discoveries!
Unfortunately, there was one problem.
Well, there were TWO problems.
Galactic dust fills the Milky Way and, when looking out into the Cosmos, this dust gets
in the way, creating its own polarization signature.
Astronomers need to correct for this dusty interference in order to find gravitational
waves in the CMB.
The European Space Agency has a telescope called Planck that is ALSO looking for evidence
of gravitational waves in this Big Bang Echo.
Planck can also create an accurate map of this galactic dust because it's surveying
the entire sky.
When the BICEP2 astronomers corrected for the dust, they only had very limited data
from Planck so, according to critics, they made insufficient corrections and the now-famous
polarization was more likely caused by dust and not gravitational waves.
The SECOND problem is that the researchers made the groundbreaking announcement BEFORE
they'd published their work to a scientific journal.
But this month, the BICEP2 team finally published their work.
Although they stand by their research, they also pointed out that dust COULD have interfered
their results.
To remove the galactic dust interference, they need to wait until Planck releases detailed
measurements later this year.
So now the big question is: Why the heck did the BICEP2 team make an announcement of this
magnitude before they'd even published?
Well, it could be argued that the BICEP2 team were so confident in their analysis that they
were just enthusiastic to get the word out.
Sometimes in science it's important to make a big announcement first to secure your name
in the history books before any competing scientists can do the same.
Or perhaps they just wanted to make their results known to the scientific community
before publishing so their conclusions could be checked.
So they may have been premature, but it's important to remember that the BICEP2 findings
COULD STILL be real and gravitational waves and the theories behind the Big Bang are just
as valid TODAY as they were in March.
Right or wrong, it's fascinating to see the scientific process play out on a very public
stage.
I just hope, for the BICEP2 scientists' sake, that the upcoming Planck data proves they
were right.
What do you think?
Let us know in the comments below and keep coming back from more science videos every
day of the week!