Big Bang's Smoking Gun Found 269
astroengine writes "For the first time, scientists have found direct evidence of the expansion of the universe, a previously theoretical event that took place a fraction of a second after the Big Bang explosion nearly 14 billion years ago. The clue is encoded in the primordial cosmic microwave background radiation that continues to spread through space to this day. Scientists found and measured a key polarization, or orientation, of the microwaves caused by gravitational waves, which are miniature ripples in the fabric of space. Gravitational waves, proposed by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity nearly 100 years ago but never before proven, are believed to have originated in the Big Bang explosion and then been amplified by the universe's inflation. 'Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today,' lead researcher John Kovac, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement."
Re:Gravity waves from the first inch of expansion (Score:3, Insightful)
"Pretty damn cool."
Yes, Antarctica!
I like the quote from project co-leader Clem Pryke (University of Minnesota) "This has been like looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead we found a crowbar,"
The even better news is that more teams are working on studying the cosmic microwave background polarisations!
Re:Next up: a direct detection (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Next up: a direct detection (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you a physicist, or have you seriously studied physics, or do you have a source for that? Because I'm sure I've read numerous times about actual physicists hoping to detect gravity waves from merging black holes.
Re:Where is the center? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where is the center? (Score:4, Insightful)
Remarkably, the oldest baryons in the* universe are in your head.
* From your reference frame. And only by a nanosecond or so.
Re:Problems inflation solves (Score:4, Insightful)
It is explained here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
Re:100 years later (Score:0, Insightful)
Except for the Einstein didn't believe in universal expansion in 1905. Thank god for Lemaitre and Hubble....
Not to downplay his contributions because they were significant, but Einstein didn't magically come up with this stuff. There's a lot of scientists who were working in this same direction at that point in time and Einstein just gets all the credit from The Science Channel crowd.
Einstein also stood on the shoulders of giants, my boy.
Re:Don't Be So Cock-Sure You Know The Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
"A viable alternate theory is that light gives up some energy while traveling extremely long distances, which shows up as red-shift. Where does the energy go? It could be the source of energy for the CMBR. It could go somewhere else. In any case, as a theory, it explains the red-shift just as well as expansion."
Excellent! Now repeat the rest of the predictions of the Lambda CDM model. Ah, no, you'll have trouble with that one.
"Another viable alternate theory is that the absorption/emission spectra of atoms differs with space/time. Perhaps atoms farther away or longer ago created and absorbed light at lower frequencies, this making older light appear red-shifted by current frequency comparisons. This theory is even harder to test, but just as good at explaining the observations. "
Even better! Now repeat the rest of the predictions of the Lambda CDM model. I think you'll have problems with that one, too.
Actually, I'll give you a bye -- all I want to see is the position of the first peak on the CMB *and* the wavelength of the oscillations in the large-scale structure, with one predicted consistently from the other. Once you've done that, if you can further get out supernovae 1a redshift/distance plots I'll give you extra credit, but since the progentiors aren't fully understood I'll give you a bye on that one, too.
See, the word "viable" has certain caveats. It has to satisfy the observations it's been built to explain *at least* as well as the theory it's replacing. Second, it has to -- self-consistently -- predict further observations that fit *at least* as well as the theory it's replacing. I'm no fan of Lambda CDM but its successes should convince anyone who's actually looked seriously at them that there's something close to reality there, even if ultimately it's a phenomenology close to reality (which it is; I can prove it's phenomenology -- rigorously -- but I can't demonstrate how wrong it actually is, and neither can anyone else at present, but I can at least assert that up until very recent times it's so close as to be indistinguishable and no that I fit all observations, and even very recently it's exceedingly good).
Re:What was that noise? (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you hear that? That was the sound of millions of religious zealots pressing their palms harder against their ears and screaming LA LA LA even louder.
I'll bite. I'm sure you'd consider me a "religious zealot." I believe in God. I believe in the Bible for what it is---a religious text that has suffered at the hands of multiple translations, compilations, and shenanigans, but that still has managed to retain the essential doctrines of man's relationship to God. It is not, and was never intended to be, a scientific text. The account in Genesis merely says that in six "days" (the original Hebrew word means "time periods") God instructed that the earth should be created, and that this creation was carried out through some unspecified agency. I don't believe God has thrown in CMB and dinosaur bones to deceive us, because I believe that he is a God of truth. My faith certainly doesn't drive me to deny science, because science is (or at least should be) ultimately a search for truth, and all truth brings us closer to the God of truth. The Bible is an excellent spiritual resource that has enhanced my relationship with God, but it tells me very little about physics, engineering, and biology.
So please tell me how your faith---which I assume dictates that the universe is a convenient sequence of coincidences, each individually of staggering improbability, and all of them taken together forming something at least as incomprehensible as the most convoluted beliefs about God---is inherently more reasonable than my faith, which is that there is a creative genius operating in all the majesty of creation.