Gravitational Waves From Big Bang Detected

[Biggles]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/science/space/detection-of-waves-in-space-buttresses-landmark-theory-of-big-bang.html?ref=science&_r=0

In a nutshell, they've (likely, though not certainly) found evidence that supports the inflation school of thought, suggesting that at the very early beginning of Time, the universe expanded violently at a rate far exceeding the speed of light itself!

Some more reading of the subject:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-082

[Slydessertfox]

So yet another breakthrough on confirming the Big Bang theory occurred today.

[Quote]

Physicists have found a long-predicted twist in light from the big bang that represents the first image of ripples in the universe called gravitational waves, researchers announced today. The finding is direct proof of the theory of inflation, the idea that the universe expanded extremely quickly in the first fraction of a nanosecond after it was born. What’s more, the signal is coming through much more strongly than expected, ruling out a large class of inflation models and potentially pointing the way toward new theories of physics, experts say.

“This is huge,” says Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved in the discovery but who predicted back in 1997 how these gravitational wave imprints could be found. “It’s not every day that you wake up and find out something completely new about the early universe. To me this is as Nobel Prize–worthy as it gets.”

The Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (BICEP2) experiment at the South Pole found a pattern called primordial B-mode polarization in the light left over from just after the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This pattern, basically a curling in the polarization, or orientation, of the light, can be created only by gravitational waves produced by inflation. “It looks like a swirly pattern on the sky,” says Chao-Lin Kuo, a physicist at Stanford University, who designed the BICEP2 detector. “We’ve found the smoking gun evidence for inflation and we’ve also produced the first image of gravitational waves across the sky.”

Such a groundbreaking finding requires confirmation from other experiments to be truly believed, physicists say. Nevertheless, the result has won praise from many leaders in the field. “There’s a chance it could be wrong, but I think it’s highly probable that the results stand up,” says Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who first predicted inflation in 1980. “I think they’ve done an incredibly good job of analysis.” The BICEP2 detectors found a surprisingly strong signal of B-mode polarization, giving them enough data to surpass the “5-sigma” statistical significance threshold for a true discovery. In fact, the researchers were so startled to see such a blaring signal in the data that they held off on publishing it for more than a year, looking for all possible alternative explanations for the pattern they found. Finally, when BICEP2’s successor at the same location, the Keck Array, came online and began showing the same result, the scientists felt confident. “That played a major role in convincing us this is something real,” Kuo says.

The cosmic microwave background is a faint glow that pervades the entire sky, dating back to just 380,000 years after the big bang. Before then the baby universe was too hot and dense for light to travel far without bumping into matter. When it cooled to the point that neutral atoms could form, light was freed to fly through space unimpeded, and it became the CMB. This glow was discovered accidentally 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who initially mistook it for interference caused by pigeon droppings on their antenna. Eventually, the scientists realized they had discovered an imprint from the primordial universe, a finding that won them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics. “It’s amazing what’s come out of the CMB,” Wilson says. “Initially I didn’t realize anywhere near how much information there might be coming from it. From my point of view, it’s been a wonderful ride.”

BICEP2 uses about 250 thumbnailsize polarization detectors to look for a difference in the CMB light from a small patch of sky coming through its telescope in two perpendicular orientations. The instrument collected data between January 2010 and December 2012 at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, where the cold, dry air offers especially stable viewing conditions. Another experiment there, the South Pole Telescope, reported finding B-mode polarization last year, although the signal it saw was at a different angular scale across the sky and was clearly due to the known process of gravitational lensing (a warping of light caused by massive objects) of the CMB by large galaxies, rather than the primordial gravitational waves seen here.

BICEP2 has plenty of competition in searching for B-mode polarization in the CMB: other projects include the Atacama B-mode Search (ABS) led by Princeton University; the POLARBEAR experiment led by the University of California, Berkeley; the high-altitude balloon–borne E and B Experiment (EBEX) run by the University of Minnesota; the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) led by Johns Hopkins University; and numerous others. Given that the BICEP2 team saw such a clear signal, these searches should easily confirm the results if they are real. “Right now it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Kamionkowski says. “In the coming years we’re going to be able to extract a huge amount from these measurements. It’s a great thing, not just for the guys who found it but also for the people they scooped” because the different experiments should collect complementary data.

The BICEP2 researchers have reported a surprisingly large number for r, the ratio of the gravitational wave fluctuations in the CMB to the fluctuations caused by perturbations in the density of matter. This value was previously estimated to be less than 0.11 based on all-sky CMB maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the Planck satellite. BICEP2’s value, however, is around 0.20. “Everything hinges on this little r,” Guth says, “and this measurement changes things quite a bit. In fact, the models that looked like they were ruled out last week are now the models that are favored this week.” Such a high value of r, for instance, indicates that inflation began even earlier than some models predicted, at one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang.

The timing of inflation, in turn, tells physicists about the energy scale of the universe when inflation was going on. BICEP2’s value of r suggests that this was the same energy scale at which all the forces of nature except gravity (the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces) might have been unified into a single force—an idea called grand unified theory. The finding bolsters the idea of grand unification and rules out a number of inflation models that do not feature such an energy scale. “This really collapses the space of plausible inflationary models by a huge amount,” Kamionkowski says. “Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, we’ll be looking for a needle in a bucket of sand.” Grand unified theories suggest the existence of new fields that act similarly to the Higgs field associated with the Higgs boson particle discovered in 2012. These new fields, in turn, would indicate that other, heavier Higgs boson particles also exist, although with masses so high they would be impossible to create in any traditional particle accelerator. “This measurement is allowing us to use the early universe as a lab for new physics in energy ranges that are otherwise inaccessible to us,” Kamionkowski says.
[\quote]
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...-polarization/

So any thoughts on this? This is not my area of expertise so I can't really comment much on it.

[General Mosh]

Fascinating. It also lends credence to the multiverse theory.

[Adar]

Threads merged into a single thread in the Atheanum

[Slydessertfox]

The Guardian has a good image that describes this:



http://www.theguardian.com/science/2...-physics-bicep

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

I saw the announcement on Space.com. Incredible! It also confirms that it is possible for spacetime to move faster than light (**cough** Warp Drive **cough**)

[Sphere]

The real big implication in finding strong evidence for inflationary theory is that it connects quantum mechanics to the macro-structure of the universe. This is something that has never really been done before.

Basically inflationary theory says the quantum fluctuations going on when the universe was infinitesimally small got "locked-in" during an incredibly rapid expansion.

From initial reports the evidence in the paper seems very strong. Clear Nobel if confirmed.

[General Mosh]

I saw the announcement on Space.com. Incredible! It also confirms that it is possible for spacetime to move faster than light (**cough** Warp Drive **cough**)

Not quite, as I understand it the only thing that can move faster than light is the universe, not anything inside the universe. I heard a bad analogy for it (bad because it doesn't really get into the intricacies of the whole thing, but it'll do). Imagine you put your car, which can travel at 120mph, inside of a cargo plane which can travel 500mph. Even if the cargo plane is traveling at 500mph, your car cannot. It's still stuck traveling at 120mph.

[knight of meh]

Not quite, as I understand it the only thing that can move faster than light is the universe, not anything inside the universe. I heard a bad analogy for it (bad because it doesn't really get into the intricacies of the whole thing, but it'll do). Imagine you put your car, which can travel at 120mph, inside of a cargo plane which can travel 500mph. Even if the cargo plane is traveling at 500mph, your car cannot. It's still stuck traveling at 120mph.

spacetime is the universe or more preciously dependent upon the universe and it's expansion and that analogy don't know where to start

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Not quite, as I understand it the only thing that can move faster than light is the universe, not anything inside the universe. I heard a bad analogy for it (bad because it doesn't really get into the intricacies of the whole thing, but it'll do). Imagine you put your car, which can travel at 120mph, inside of a cargo plane which can travel 500mph. Even if the cargo plane is traveling at 500mph, your car cannot. It's still stuck traveling at 120mph.

That's not quite the same thing. Warp Drive is like you have a bubble of spacetime (a bubble of the universe) and you take the space time in front of it and put it behind it. It's more like cutting out a slice of pizza, moving it through the air, and putting it into another pizza.

[knight of meh]

That's not quite the same thing. Warp Drive is like you have a bubble of spacetime (a bubble of the universe) and you take the space time in front of it and put it behind it. It's more like cutting out a slice of pizza, moving it through the air, and putting it into another pizza.

I thought it was compressing it in front of you and expanding it behind you .. not moving it at all but deforming it to achieve travel .

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Well... it's really hard to wrap one's mind around. You ARE deforming the spacetime, but the spacetime in turn gets displaced when deformed, leaving a bubble of flat, normal spacetime that moved from one place to another. You're essentially shifting chunks of the universe around.

[Ludicus]

Clear Nobel if confirmed.

Robert Grossteste (1175-1253) deserves the Nobel.

On the Light or the Beggining of Forms

Excerpts,

The first corporeal form which some call corporeity is in my opinion light... Thus light, which is the first form created in first matter, multiplied itself by its very nature an infinite number of times on all sides and spread itself out uniformly in every direction.
... In this way it proceeded in the beginning of time to extend matter which it could not leave behind, by drawing it out along with itself into a mass the size of the material universe. .... Therefore, when light, which is in itself simple, is multiplied an infinite number of times, it must extend matter, which is likewise simple, into finite dimensions.

[Euphoric]

What this means is that we have pushed our general understanding of the early universe prior to the inflationary epoch (10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang), that is to say that we have a very limited amount of inflationary models to choose from in order to explain this phenomenon. This is a huge development, and it is yet another step in understanding the early universe and, ultimately, singularity.

[Sphere]

Robert Grossteste (1175-1253) deserves the Nobel.

On the Light or the Beggining of Forms

Excerpts,

The expansion was not perfectly uniform. The slight dis-uniformity is where all the interesting stuff is.

[knight of meh]

What this means is that we have pushed our general understanding of the early universe prior to the inflationary epoch (10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang), that is to say that we have a very limited amount of inflationary models to choose from in order to explain this phenomenon. This is a huge development, and it is yet another step in understanding the early universe and, ultimately, singularity.

The expansion was not perfectly uniform. The slight dis-uniformity is where all the interesting stuff is.

pictures explain it well..

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

In a nutshell, yep, pretty much.

[General Mosh]

Some articles to help with understanding the implications of the whole discovery.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...logy-now-what/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...science-space/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...e#.Uyn3HPldVyU