New York (BBN)-The cosmological saga surrounding astrophysics rebuts a past study yet again.
Earlier this year Scientists proclaimed to unveil the mystery surrounding Big Bang.
The researchers who gathered in Cambridge this March, announced that they had found the “bang” of big bang which implied an evidence of a pattern of light from ancient space.
The study claimed to be a revelation in the direction to discover as to what happened in the prior moments of Big bang, 13 billion years ago, reports thewestsidestory.net.
All the hype surrounding these experiments celebrated as ‘the first evidence of the Big Bang’ have been put to rest as of now.
In the experiment, scientists used data from BICEP 2 telescope in Antarctica when they claimed to discover a pattern called “B mode polarization”, a pattern leftover from the formation of universe – a faint light that is the afterglow of Big Bang.
These swirls were thought to be made by primordial gravitational waves, finding which, as the study suggested, would be a breakthrough in the study of inflation.
In a week less scientists all round the world started raising questions on the study. As there are no ‘clean’ windows in the sky, the happenstance of ignoring the dust particles seems peculiar.
The new data from Astronomy and Astrophysics journal by the Planck team reveals that Bicep 2 overlooked the effects of scattering light gleaming off galactic dust. The view received by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite states that the original view showed too much dust in the sky to confirm that what they saw was really gravitational waves.
Though the studies made by Planck team are in preliminary stage, the full map of interstellar dust charted by them defy contamination claims made by Bicep 2 on nearly all grounds. How much of Bicep 2’s analysis actually came from dust is still a tantalizing question.
There may also be a plausibility of signal withdrawing itself once the contamination is removed. At the same time there are stagnant speculations that maybe Bicep2 detected more than just dust, but the physicists are almost certain that claims made back them in March were premature.
“The estimates of dust were clearly too low”, said Subir Sarkar, head of the particle theory group at the University of Oxford.
“They had based this on the preliminary results shown by Planck last spring, but the rather approximate procedure they used has been widely criticized … and this criticism is clearly justified in the light of the updated Planck results,” Sarkar wrote in an e-mail. He also hinted that the two teams should work in together to gauge the signal in an effective manner and deduce the proximity of dust particles present in the signal.
“Meanwhile, it is clearly premature to assert (as so many have!) that BICEP2 has found evidence for inflation,” Sarkar wrote.
With all the speculations surrounding the matter, professors at Harvard University are claiming that they already justified the absence of dust in the experiment carried out, earlier in June.
According to John Kovac, an associate professor in the astronomy department at Harvard University, who led the BICEP2 work, the paper published by them clearly states the lack of dust with a significant caveat:
“Since we submitted this, paper new information on polarized dust emission has become available from the Planck experiment in a series of papers. … While these papers do not offer definitive information on the level of dust contamination in our field, they do suggest that it may well be higher than any of the models considered,” the authors wrote then. “More data are clearly required to resolve the situation.”
The new data just intrigues the firmness and interrogations.
“This paper only confirms in more detail the trend which was already indicated,” Kovac wrote in an e-mail.
Meanwhile, the teams have decided to collaborate in the surge to demystify the ever tangling cosmic truth. They are expected to publish something by November.
BBN/JF-23Sept14-2:55pm (BST)