Posted on 09/28/2014 10:47:34 PM PDT by smokingfrog
Stardust got in their eyes.
In the spring a group of astronomers who go by the name of BICEP announced they had detected ripples in the sky, gravitational waves that were the opening notes of the Big Bang. The finding was heralded as potentially the greatest discovery of the admittedly young century, but some outside astronomers said the group had underestimated the extent to which interstellar dust could have contaminated the results - a possibility that the group conceded in its official report in June.
Now a long-awaited report by astronomers using data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite has confirmed that criticism, concluding that there was enough dust in BICEP’s view of the sky to produce the swirly patterns without recourse to primordial gravitational waves.
“We show that even in the faintest dust-emitting regions there are no ‘clean’ windows in the sky,” the authors, led by Jean-Loup Puget of the Astrophysical Institute in Paris, wrote in a paper submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and posted online Monday.
As a result, cosmologists like the BICEP crew cannot ignore dust in their calculations. “However,” said Jonathan Aumont, another of the Planck authors, also from the Paris institute, “our work does not imply that they did not measure at all a cosmological signal. Moreover, due to the very different observation techniques and signal processing in the BICEP2 and Planck experiments, we cannot say how much of the signal they measured is due to dust” and how much to gravitational waves.
So this is not the end of the story, both the Planck scientists and the BICEP group agree. But the original euphoria that the secrets of inflation and quantum gravity might be at hand has evaporated.
(Excerpt) Read more at tech.mit.edu ...
later
Not to worry.
There’s still a great future in supplying climate models to the UN.
There’s got to be a David Bowie joke in here somewhere.
Not necessarily a GOOD joke, but a joke nonetheless.
Now you know why he wore the eye patch.
Searching for Stardust.....
Coincidence that they are admitting this just now, on the heels of the math that’s showing black holes and the singularities required for them as well as the big bang are not possible?
I understand that the work lacks full peer review as of yet, but combined with this it is starting to look a bit like CYA before the real wave hits.
Was Uranus in the area where these measurements were made?
I hate it when my sky ripples get contaminated.
The Legendary Stardust Cowboy (from whom Bowie took the Stardust...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ood0jv9Lng
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