Swirls In the Afterglow of the Big Bang Could Set Stage For Major Discovery

sciencehabit writes "Scientists have spotted swirling patterns in the radiation lingering from the big bang, the so-called cosmic microwave background. The observation itself isn't Earth-shaking, as researchers know that these particular swirls or 'B-modes' originated in conventional astrophysics, but the result suggests that scientists are closing in on a much bigger prize: B-modes spawned by gravity waves that rippled through the infant universe. That observation would give them a direct peek into the cosmos' first fraction of a second and possibly shed light on how it all began."

Re:The very small at the start became very large

[slew]

Short story swirls** have nothing to do with strings, nor dimensions, just vanilla big-bang stuff...

Let's start with what this is.

Basically, cosmic microwave background radiation (aka CMB) is theorized to be weakly linearly polarized due to scattering processes like Thomson Scattering [wikipedia.org] with free-electrons. Since this polarization has 2 net degrees of freedom, you can measure it a few different ways, but one interesting way to do so is to use divergence [wikipedia.org] component (aka E-mode), and curl [wikipedia.org] (aka B-mode) which comes from an analogy with electromagenetics*** So far they've measured some linear polarization with an E-mode component (since it has divergence only, you can think of as being scattered from the position of the last object/electron it interacted with shortly after the big-bang), but until now they've not confident that they measured any net B-mode component in CMB radiation.

E-mode polarization measurements in conjunction with theories about the CMB temperature has helped to advance some theory about some cosmological constants. B-mode measurements are interesting in that if detected are likely from stochastic scattering of a radiation field which is theorized to come from some sort of gravitational waves generated when the early universe was undergoing inflation, but unfortunatly since this is a scattering effect, it could also originate as E-mode and later converted to B-mode by gravitational interaction with matter since the big-bang (a kind of gravitational lensing effect). So B-mode is really small and noisy (which is why they had a hard time isolating it), but it might help us understand if the inflation model is consistent with the universe we see.

**Somehow "curl" [wikipedia.org] gets converted "swirls" in laymanspeak...
***static electric fields (aka 'E' fields) exhibit net divergence from electrical "charges", but static magnetic (aka 'B'**** fields) don't have this because there aren't magnetic monopoles, so they only exhibit net curl (kind of a rotation), but this scattering polarization "mode" really doesn't have too much to do with this (since even polarized electromagnetic radiation has both E-field and B-field components), except for the general mathematical concepts of div and curl.
****Apparently, Maxwell used the letter 'B' (and 'H') to represent magnetic fields when he wrote his Maxell's equations and it stuck. Today, 'M' is commonly used for magnetization (maxwell apparently used 'I' for magnetization and 'C' for current, but now we use 'I' for current so go figure some terminology doesn't stick).

So... eddies in the space-time continuum?

[Somebody Is Using My]

"Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum."

"Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he? Is he?" He pushed his hands into the pocket of his dressing gown and looked knowledgeably into the distance.

"What?" said Ford.

"Er, who," said Arthur, "is Eddy, then, exactly?"

Ford looked angrily at him. "Will you listen?" he snapped.

"I have been listening," said Arthur, "but I'm not sure it's helped."

Ford grasped him by the lapels of his dressing gown and spoke to him as slowly and distinctly and patiently as if he were somebody from a telephone company accounts department. "There seem ..." he said, "to be some pools ..." he said, "of instability ..." he said, "in the fabric ..." he said ...

Arthur looked foolishly at the cloth of his dressing gown where Ford was holding it. Ford swept on before Arthur could turn the foolish look into a foolish remark.

"... in the fabric of space-time," he said.

"Ah, that," said Arthur.

"Yes, that," confirmed Ford.

They stood there alone on a hill on prehistoric Earth and stared each other resolutely in the face.

"And it's done what?" said Arthur.

"It," said Ford, "has developed pools of instability."

"Has it?" said Arthur, his eyes not wavering for a moment.

"It has," said Ford with a similar degree of ocular immobility.

"Good," said Arthur.

"See?" said Ford.

"No," said Arthur.

There was a quiet pause.

"The difficulty with this conversation," said Arthur after a sort of pondering look had crawled slowly across his face like a mountaineer negotiating a tricky outcrop, "is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. They weren't like this. Except perhaps some of the ones I've had with elms which sometimes get a bit bogged down."

"Arthur," said Ford.

"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.

"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."

"Ah, well I'm not sure I believe that."

They sat down and composed their thoughts.

Ford got out his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was making vague humming noises and a tiny light on it was flickering faintly.

"Flat battery?" said Arthur.

"No," said Ford, "there is a moving disturbance in the fabric of space+ time, an eddy, a pool of instability, and it's somewhere in our vicinity."

"Where?"

Ford moved the device in a slow lightly bobbing semi-circle. Suddenly the light flashed.

"There!" said Ford, shooting out his arm. "There, behind that sofa!"

Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.

"Why," he said, "is there a sofa in that field?"

"I told you!" shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. "Eddies in the space-time continuum!"

"And this is his sofa, is it?" asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

(from /Life, The Universe and Everything/ by Douglas Adams...as if you didn't know)