The astronomers who this spring announced that they had evidence of primordial gravitational waves jumped the gun because they did not take into proper account a confounding effect of galactic dust, two new analyses suggest. Although further observations may yet find the signal to emerge from the noise, independent experts now say they no longer believe that the original data constituted significant evidence.
Researchers said in March that they had found a faint twisting pattern in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the Big Bang’s afterglow, using a South Pole-based radio telescope called BICEP2. This pattern, they said, was evidence for primordial gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time generated in the early Universe (see 'Telescope captures view of gravitational waves'). The announcement caused a sensation because it seemed to confirm the theory of cosmic inflation, which holds that the cosmos mushroomed in size during the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
However two independent analyses now suggest that those twisting patterns in the CMB polarization could just as easily be accounted for by dust in the Milky Way Galaxy.
“Based on what we know right now… we have no evidence for or against gravitational waves,” says Uroš Seljak, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of one of the latest studies.
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