Science for Thought

First Time

First Time

No, this isn't about doing something for the first time. It's the quest to find the very first instance of the Big Bang. There is a big telescope directly at the South Pole that is being used to find the first evidence of the Big Bang. These are two microwave telescopes that are searching for very faint signals from the gravitational waves sent out only a very, very fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

This array is located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

The reason they put these two telescopes at the South Pole is because it's the best location for detecting faint microwave signals. It's almost like being in outer space. Only one astronomer stays at the South Pole station to operate the telescopes during the perpetual dark winter season.

This wild goose chase, as it has been labeled, is the work of one individual. There was no evidence for the existence of residual gravitational waves from the Big Bang. In fact, many scientists didn't believe that they existed. Professor Alan H. Guth at Boston University became frustrated with the concept of the Big Bang. This is the guy who came up with the idea of the Inflation theory, which explains how the universe became so large in such a short period of time. His theory has revolutionized the whole model of the Big Bang. This inflation occurred 10 to the -37 seconds after the Big Bang and expanded to billons of times larger in billionths of a second.

This theory has not been proven to everyone's satisfaction. The real proof would be the discovery of residual gravitational waves from this inflation time. That's what the astronomers at the South Pole are trying to do. They're hunting for this smoking gun evidence.

The problem is that these gravitational waves are mixed into the quantum giggle in space-time of the universe. If these waves do exist they would show up in the microwave background radiation that still fills the universe. The Big Bang gravitational waves would change the polarization of the microwave radiation, sort of a twisting pattern that would be a distinct signature, called a B-mode, in this background microwave data. However, these B-mode polarizations are exceedingly faint. By increasing the sensitivity of their microwave telescopes, called BICEP2, they discovered a good signal, but it was believed to be too strong to be the Big Bang waves they were hunting for. There are a number of sources in our own galaxy that cause B-mode pattern. Synchrotron radiation can cause this, but it's much too weak to be responsible for their signal. Dust in the galaxy could also line up in a magnetic field but it was also ruled out by the data that they had measured. So, the conclusion after years of work indicated that they had found the elusive Big Bang gravity waves.

However, increasing scrutiny of this amazing data has proven that the power of their signal was just too high, 0.2 verses the 0.1 value that the Planck telescope in space had discovered about the galactic dust's contribution to B-mode polarization. Because of this the authenticity of the BICEP2 data was put into question. The conclusion is that 75% of the data is caused by galactic dust. This is too high for the original B-mode data to be valid. The B-mode effect on the microwave signal should have been much lower if it was caused by inflation at the time of the Big Bang.

So, the end result is that more data needs to be obtained. This is how science works. Observations must be verified and must match up to the theory. If it doesn't, it's time for a new theory or better data. That data might be found with BICEP3, the next evolution of the South Pole telescope array.

Thanks for reading.