The search for gravitational waves from the early universe has not yet finished.
This was announced by the European Space Agency last Friday, to make public the . results of joint analysis of data from the Planck space observatory, located between Earth and Mars, and BICEP2, located at the South Pole
The news came after more than six months of intense debate – unexpectedly popular in the mass media, which began in March 2014 when the team announced the discovery BICEP2 footprint of primordial gravitational waves in his observations (ie the traces that have left the expansion of the universe after the . cosmic inflation, which connects quantum mechanics (the physics of the smallest) with large-scale structure of: Big Bang or big bang)
It starts with an idea universe (the physics of the largest).
One of the predictions of this idea is the presence of gravitational waves distorted spacetime, leaving a footprint in the microwave light resulting from the Big Bang and that lights the whole sky behind the stars and galaxies.
That light is known as radiation of microwaves and found 50 years ago.
But that footprint is so weak that it is necessary to measure fluctuations in the microwave background radiation with an accuracy close to 0.000001 percent.
After huge technological leaps and effort, it has instruments that reach this level of precision; BICEP2 is one of them.
Being located on the surface of the Earth, BICEP2 is limited by the atmosphere, which can not be observed all the frequencies necessary to discard some sources of pollution signal for example, the brightness of interstellar dust -.
In announcing the discovery of gravitational waves, BICEP2 used information from other observations for contamination in the signal
But the instrument with the best measurements to clean that signal was still watching the microwave light from space. That is Planck.
was to combine the two experiments when the signal, previously thought was just the trace of gravitational waves in the background radiation was found to be consistent with the pattern produced by the glow of interstellar dust and magnetic field of the galaxy.
The history of BICEP2 and Planck is common in science.
In light of the effects we thought negligible, we thought conclusive remarks are just intermediate steps on the road to better observations and better theories.
In the immediacy and brevity that imposed in the age of Twitter, it’s easy to think that not discover gravitational waves is bad news, when in fact it is a triumph of openness and critical analysis with the physical changes the world we live in.
Researcher, Institute of Space Astrophysics (France) Ph. D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Member of the Planck collaboration
Why so important
The concern of scientists find evidence of primordial gravitational waves from three questions.? Whence is the universe? Why is distributed well? Why is that? The first thing to try is precisely gravitational waves, one of the predictions of the theory of relativity Einstein, that have not measured directly or indirectly. Second, the theory of cosmic inflation, which would explain why the large-scale structure of the universe is as we see today (homogeneous and similar in all directions).
So, in March 2014, when a group of researchers announced detection BICEP2 telescope, some categorized it as the discovery of the year. While the joint analysis of BICEP2 and Planck ruled this finding, it is not a failure. For now, experiments on land, about six, including Spider BICEP3 and mission, and draft a balloon being rescued in Antarctica continue throwing data. Come satellite projects, although one operating out of the atmosphere to measure background radiation will not be ready before 15 years.
JUAN DIEGO SOLER
TIME
On Twitter:juandiegosoler
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