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Big Bang's Smoking Gun Found
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."
Pretty damn cool.
My hat's off too all the hard-working, dedicated cosmetologists that made this possible.
A direct detection of a gravitational wave moving the mirrors of a large scale interferometer is up next. In the next few years, Advanced LIGO (US), Advanced Virgo (Italy) and KAGRA (Japan) will come online with the hope of directly detecting gravitational waves from sources such as supernovae and coalescing binary star systems. With this kind of network, it will then be possible to coordinate both electromagnetic and gravitational searches of our sky. This is useful for many reasons, one of which is that it lets us listen to the sound of black holes colliding where no light escapes.
Exciting times!
If they thought finding gravitational waves was hard, just wait until they try to locate a drooling autotroph.
Einstein's theories continue to astound.
"Inflation" and "expansion" are VERY different when talking about cosmology - some journalist flipped those two words. They supposedly found evidence of inflation, which is a big deal. Finding evidence of expansion is very very old news - like first half of the 20th Century old.
We already have plenty of direct evidence for the expansion of the universe. See redshifting of galaxies etc.
This announcement is about inflation - a particular period of rapid expansion immediately after the big bang.
C'mon, we all know from centuries ago it just was God's wet farting...
Ok, fine. But is it webscale ?
There are three problems in cosmology that inflation solves: flatness: the universe is very close to its critical density, the horizon problem: the universe looks like it is in thermal equilibrium for no good reason, and absence of magnetic monopoles.
Note that this the second indirect evidence for the existence of gravitational waves, the first one was the orbital decay of a binary system that included a pulsar, discovered by Hulse and Taylor (Nobel Prize 1993). Today's result, if confirmed, seems pretty spectacular, and might be rewarded with a second Nobel Prize. For a first direct detection of gravitational waves, we have to wait for first detections by LIGO, Virgo and eLISA.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
I think we should all wave back!
Some interesting perspective from Matt Strassler, who's a particle physicist at Harvard.
He points out that this is still an *indirect* observation of gravitational waves (and not the first one) and that the results look sensibly in line with some predictions from inflation. And that while this is a tremendous experiment, it's not any kind of "smoking gun", and we really need to wait for replication to get properly excited.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
No, we all know that the Universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
I think you have it wrong. You see, these creationists...they have a book which describes exactly how the world was created. It is called the Bible and it states pretty clearly how it happened. The problem here is that this so called "evidence" contradicts the very strong evidence they have...namely, their book.
Since it contradicts their book by claiming to take billions of years, it must (by very definition) be wrong. So what you really have is the Big bang is a bad interpretation of the natural world.
Now excuse my while I go wash my hands for typing that.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
At least lets see what the NRA has to say about this.
Have gnu, will travel.
If gravity waves exist, wouldn't that imply that gravitrons exist as well? Otherwise it would be like having water waves without water...
That's silly. Everyone knows the universe was danced into existence by Shiva, the Lord of the Dance. You cannot deny the power of dance. Lose yourself to dance.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I live in perpetual fear of The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Well, I'm sure you have a citation to prove it, then.
Incorrect. Or, rather, been shown to be false by the evidence. And it was such a damn elegant model, too. Bravo to the team of researchers who've been working a decade on this satellite and these observations. I believe Neil and another scientist had a small bet about this, so he's also out of pocket a few dollars. Now we just have to hypothesise new ideas that will eliminate the many kludgy math bits out of Big Bang model. This news, and 120 more BlackBerry jobs lost today, means a sad day here in Waterloo (at the Perimeter Institute).
DaveyJJ
Or they'll say that Genisis is a book of the Old Testament that was written but not observed and therefore open to interpretation...as it is.
We've been saying that. What's your point?
Can we use the orientation of these waves to calculate a point of origin relative to ourselves?
That would be awesome. I would like to face that direction when I pray.
Crowbar? BICEP? What's next, the theoretical physicist responsible for the discovery just happens to be named Gordon Freeman?
Man I would love to ride one of those waves... to infinity and beyond!
news 14 billion years ago
FTFY
Perhaps if the Bible said '7 units of time' then there wouldn't be such a big emotional fuss over such a meaningless argument.
its time to get rid of the silly but widespread idea of inflation coming from a singularity point source. The universe was hot, dense and still probably infinite, it just started to inflate locally. We probably will never know exactly what was before, but thinking it all came from a point source seems a little silly.
http://scienceblogs.com/starts...
This was the old news...
Basically sifting through information gathered from older CMB detectors, they discovered a statistical B-mode in the data that could have come from gravitational wave that occurred during inflation, but the data was really too noisy to be sure.
The new news is they used a new detectors which are capable of making cleaner measurements to convince themselves that the detected B-mode was unlikely to come from gravitational lensing after the big-bang. The current evidence apparently is consistent with the B-mode coming from a gravitational waves that are predicted to occur during the inflationary period of the universe.
If I understand correctly they measured the polarization of the 2.73 background radiation of the Universe. But at these temperature you only have radio waves, how do you detect their polarization? Moreover with an instrument that looks like e telescope on the picture? Can someone enlighten me?
Except your quote says exactly nothing of any use about what happened.
And here I was going to respond "1964 called, they want their news back".
Seriously, this is cool, but astroengine's teaser above "For the first time" is nowhere near correct.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
Better yet, it's a misinterpretation by, wait for it.....
A Roman Catholic Priest, and thus, a creationist!
Nah, he couldn't possibly know what the Bible means......
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"God is very far ahead of you"
In my own defense, God did have a head start.
I'll bet I'll type "waka wama wana" before He does. So there.
The word typically translated "day" or "days" in Genesis is originally "Yowm" (root meaning "hot"). Strong's translates this variously as "period"—it's a very general term that I usually read as "era".
My limited understanding is that most of Jesus' contemporaries believed in an ancient universe. It was Ussher's bestseller that, ahem, fixed that problem.
Concordance here.
Ingenious inventions here.
Why wouldyou believe that priest has a better idea of what the Bible says than a random 3 year old from down the street?
The silliest part of it is where the book comes from. The bible is a creation of a committee of the early catholic church that sat down with more than 1500 spiritual texts and decided on 300 that were important enough to include in a book given to all priests. Now ask a young earth creationist what they think of the catholic church and the typical response is the whore of Babylon, yet the book they so revere as the accurate word of god was creating by a committee of early members of the catholic church. It's terribly ironic.
The gun is the universe. These people only found the smoke. Not the smoking gun.
Well, it does say about commanding their hosts. Physics has nothing to say about whether or not the universe had their hosts commanded during inflation, so this could be a valuable addition to our knowledge.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Perhaps if the bible didn't try to anthropomorphize the universe there wouldnt be such a big emotional fuss over it.
Good-bye
Collasping universes do.
It's all a matter of units and applying the correct conversion - imperial, metric, BIBILE.
I have video proof that a runaway queen can freeze her whole country and create a giant ice castle in less time than a pop song.
My kids strongly believe it's really cool, therefore global warming science is wrong.
Yes, if the measurments can be confirmed for different (and hopefully bigger parts of the sky), the cyclic model of Turok and Steinhardt seems to be very unlikely now, as it has predicted a very small polarisation of the cosmic microwave background.
What puzzles me, is that neither the WMAP probe nor the Planck probe have found a polarisation and now the polarisation was found with a ground based telescope? The resolution of the WMAP probe was probably too low, but the planck probe has had a much higher resolution.
Sven
P.S.: An explanation and comparison of both, the big bang inflationary model and the cyclic model featuring Dr. Paul J. Steinhardt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
All evidence of the big bang, and anything else that isn't as it says in the bible is because of either:
1) God testing your faith to prove you are worthy of heaven.
2) The Devil trying to trick you so you will be damned to hell.
From my point of view it looks like God and the Devil are both trying to get everyone to hell.
First of all, how is it that all stars moving apart from each other rapidly is not "first direct evidence" of the universe's expansion? And secondly, how could the expansion of the universe amplify gravitational waves? Space stretching would thin out the waves because they would be expressed over a wider area. Also, you don't create more gravity without adding mass or energy. Neither is occurring due to universe expansion, and of course the fact that mass and energy can't be "created" under any circumstances anyway.
Why should we take what Creationists say seriously?
The real mystery to me is why any nerd would be willing to embrace fiction built around the idea that we need the beautiful people extend their olive branch to help the poor, retarded geniuses.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
And the official position of the Catholic church is that the creation account in Genesis is metaphorical. The first documentation of this (that I know of) came from St Augustine a mere 100 years after the Bible was canonized.
Mainline protestants tend to consider Genesis (and the rest of the Bible, too) as being metaphorical, as well (with plenty of lively conversation about what all the metaphors mean). It is really just the fundamentalists which are stuck on literalism.
I met a guy from Sri Lanka once who had the best comment yet on "Prayer in schools":
"I am perfectly ok with prayer in schools, and I would encourage it but it seems a bit impractical if they don't already have an altar to catch the blood."
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
"The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief."
PHRASING!!!
I don't know why you need to go arguing about all these fancy foreign words; if English was good enough for Jesus then it should be good enough for us to understand his teachings. You think if he wanted us using Hebrew words, he would have written the bible in it.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
So, they have this evidence in a box or something?
Forgive me if this sounds stupid, but I was under the impression that all measurements of gravity, radiation and electromagnetism were indirect by nature.
"For the first time, scientists have found direct evidence of the expansion of the universe,"
Yes, that's exactly what happened today.
*facepalm*
Well, Catholic schools (at least the one I went to) regularly teach evolution in their biology classes, amongst other things. They are hardly the same groups that push this anti-science BS (anymore), shit they even appologized to Galileo (after 400 years.... so they are....slow...)
While I have plenty I am happy to lambast the Catholics over; I have to hand it to them....they don't really push the creationism as we have come to know and despise. In fact, while you may find lay Catholics with all manner of beliefs, including young earth creationists and the like.... they Clergy tend to be a bit more level headed on these things and will often even say, flat out, the Bible is a book of allegorical stories and not a history book.
For example, as much as I dislike the man, Pope John Paul II did say:
"Today, almost half a century after publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory. "
That said, I did go to a Catholic High school, and there was a teacher told he was going to hell for teaching evolution.... he was told that by a student; not a priest, a brother, or anyone else in the clergy... a teenage student.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Good grief. Do you mean there is no one here that can imagine a great voice saying "let there be light..." then then BANG! the birth of the universe? Must we forever live with the ridiculous science-versus-God fighting, when, as just demonstrated, they actually go together? Darwin himself was a religionist when he began his epic journey. The overwhelming evidence of evolution convinced him that species do change and mutate. Why wouldn't they? Most of the first generation of creatures could not adapt, and so died off.
Lastly, do not forget the scriptures that mention how thousands of years are like one day to God.
This should get me flamed like a pig on a spit from all sides...
Science is a process of discovery, and we need to be open to alternatives that are not disproven. The expansion of the universe is a great example of this. Everybody "knows" that the universe is expanding and that this indicates a Big Bang is the most likely origin story. But technically, all we have observed is that there is a correlation between distance and red shift, assuming that absorption spectra are constant over space/time and light doesn't chance frequency in travel. We have not actually observed that distant galaxies are actually moving away from us. We literally have no direct evidence that the universe is expanding. It's a theory. Not proven fact.
To put a more fine point on it, we know (can demonstrate experimentally) that relative motion is _a_ cause of red-shift, and we observe red-shift. We have not, in fact, observed this relative motion on scales large enough to demonstrate universal expansion. This is an indirect measurement believed to be reliable, but not proven. We can only observe relative motion on very close things via parallax, and we've found that some things are coming towards us, so relative motion locally is not dominated by expansion. We rely on the theory. It could be wrong.
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. 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.
As a scientist, remember the difference between theory and proof.
--Jaborandy
The AC may be referring to results from the Planck observatory (see, e.g., planck.caltech.edu/publications2013Results.html), which put some constraints on the inflationary era. What is interesting is the results that were released today may not completely agree with the Planck data. It is too early to say if the disagreement is real or not.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
"And it was such a damn elegant model, too."
You evidently have a different definition of "elegant" to me. My definition of "elegant" does not include "theories containing hand-crafted and unjustified potentials of a strikingly bizarre form inserted purely phenomenologically into a theory that is a phenomenological attempt to see what might happen if some facets of M theory are put onto large scales". That's not to defend inflation too much but the potentials of inflatons are typically quadratic or quartic, which is a lot neater than the potential in ekpyrosis, and the setup with two infinite, flat branes is at least as contrived as the inflaton.
All of that said, let's wait until the dust settles before we rule models out based on gravitational radiation alone. Their position is certainly looking somewhat precarious, but there may be ways out yet.
Who do you think predicted the gravitational radiation in the first place? There's a reason we've been wanting to find them since the 1990s and it's not that observational cosmologists were arguing with theoreticians that they were definitely there.
Tit.
ixnay on the OSTSHay! You don't want to raise him up!
There is nothing in genisis on how it was created? source please...but if the magic wave of the hand is what you need, you should reference harry potter? Please stop the hate. And be accurate, he spoke a word, that word could have been big bang theory, or super string or gravitational pulsing, remember you are looking at what was done from the viewpoint of 1500 years ago.
nice...was going to post this but I wouldn't have explained it as well...
honest quesiton: do you think what you described is commonly understood among physicists? It seems to me, and I of course could be wrong, that alot of stuff I see on /. is conflating what happens *on the event horizon* with the actual black hole itself
I even got into a discussion with the editors of the Black Hole wiki...the first sentence is the maxim "BH is a region of space from with nothing, even light, can escape"
Thank you Dave Raggett
Hey, no, that's great man. Whatever floats your boat.
You can actually say pretty much anything you want about what happened before the big bang. It could be a guy in a lab quoting a book sarcastically right before he flipped the switch and blew up the universe. It could very much be an all powerful all knowing god who set in motion all that ever happened with the expressed purpose of bringing about life on earth. We dunno.
As for everything happening after the big bang, it's cool as long as you take the whole thing as a metaphor. A story by ignorant barbarians for the purpose of filling a gap in their knowledge with a placeholder. And now we know better and we have more details of what actually happened. As long as you don't presume the story is literal and more correct then what actually happened, as long as that placeholder doesn't command you to slaughter the infidels or vote for a shmuck, then yeah, we're cool.
Lastly, do not forget the scriptures that mention how thousands of years are like one day to God.
Still kinda off by a few magnitudes. Age of the universe is ~14 billion years. Our sun formed ~4.57 billion years ago and earth formed after that.
Similes are fine too. It's "like" thousands of years. "like". If you squint hard enough the story kinda matches the observed truths.
Best part of this argument is that anyone that knew anything about the Bible (not automatically including bible nuts in this group) would know that Jesus didn't actually write ANY of the bible.
The Old Testament was all before hit birth, and the Gospels, letters etc. were all written after his death.
"....namely, an incorrect interpretation of their book.."
FIFY, FTW
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You should stop posting. I've now read 3-4 posts of yours in the past 30 minutes that are blatantly wrong and stupid. You are seriously ignorant.
1) 6 months to crunch years of scientific data
2) Catholics are creationists.
Both of these are wrong. You're stupid.
Time to play:
Name that logical fallacy!
Would that be: argument form authority?
Ding ding ding, we have a winner.
Why do you think just becasue they are a priest they know what the Bible means?
I went to catholic school, and I constantly pointed out error in priest beliefs. Hell, most of them don't even know their own theology, much less it's history.
A previous pope talked about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Man does belief things he doesn't understand, spout meaningless statement to show everyone how ignorant he is: news at 11.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ah,but as the prime mover all else in the universe is a manifestation of His will, yourself included. So in fact it was He that typed "waka wama wana", using you as His instrument. :-)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
A gravity wave is a phenomenon in fluid dynamics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave
A gravitational wave is a disturbance in the fabric of spacetime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave
Could you let me know which bits are meaningless and betray ignorance? Genuine question.
"And there was evening, and there was morning -- the first day."
"And there was evening, and there was morning -- the first period."
"And there was evening, and there was morning -- the first era."
"And there was evening, and there was morning -- the first hot."
"And there was evening, and there was morning -- the first Yowm."
I think "day" makes the most sense when evening and morning are the boundary points. How do evening and morning translate literally?
Ah, you just hit upon one of my pet peeves.
If we're playing name that logical fallacy, then argument from authority is in and of itself an argument from authority fallacy.
Why?
Because logical fallacies are an authority that limits rational thought.
Having said that- you're completely right, though I think most atheists would classify theistic evolution as just another form of Intelligent Design.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The new observations have a lot to do with testing the theory of inflation, but they are not really focused on the Big Bang. The Big Bang has the observed expansion of the universe, the age of the oldest globular clusters, the existence of the cosmic microwave background and the theory of primordial nucleosynthesis to support it. If you run the expansion backwards, you shrink to a point in finite (backwards) time. That the oldest globular clusters of stars are just a little younger than that, that the cosmic microwave background shows the universe was hot and uniform in the past, all gas and no stars, and that the ratio of primordial elements shows that it was even hotter further back in the past but that element formation was quenched by the cooling of the expansion, these things support the Big Bang theory You don't really need a smoking gun when the artillery has already laid down a barrage. These new observations take advantage of the pristine nature of the cosmic microwave background to test some ideas about what happened before the elements formed. But inflation theory is an elaboration of Big Bang theory, not really a proof.
Greetings and peach be with you.
I will respond also and do so as young earth creationist. Now, before I say what I have to say I am not going to sit here and debate or argue with anyone. I have a job and a life and don’t have time to sit and argue on the Internet.
I clicked on the article and read the whole thing in its entirety and nothing has changed. Honestly I think this article attacks people who believe in the Steady State Theory more then anyone.
The Singularity in a gist, Extremely dense, hot ball of matter expands rapidly. The theory of inflation happens in there to deal with the horizon problem. Billions of years later here we are today.
So you found some evidence of a rapidly expanding early universe. Cool, I believe I believe in a rapidly expanding universe too. The Bible says that God stretched out the heaves. Now, see, I get the image of everything in the universe being in one spot and getting “stretched.” Kind of like your theory. The biggest difference is you believe that this happened on its own and I believe that it happens by the hand of a Divine being. You think it took billions of years to get to where we are and I think it took a lot quicker. So we found some evidence that says this happened. Again, you say naturally, I say Divine, but there is the evidence for it. Awesome.
However, those Steady State folks are not doing so hot.
Have a great night.
Best part of this argument is that anyone that knew anything about the Bible (not automatically including bible nuts in this group) would know that Jesus didn't actually write ANY of the bible.
The Old Testament was all before hit birth, and the Gospels, letters etc. were all written after his death.
Gee, what a revelation! Next thing you will probably tell me that the New Testament was not written in Hebrew but in Greek and Aramaic!
Why should we take what Creationists say seriously?
Because they vote?
This is the first direct evidence for gravity waves, but another very clever indirect one earned a Nobel Price in 1993.
Oh, I forgot about this crowd....instead, i am hip deep in sarcasm. oh, well.
Too bad very few can even understand what they are talking about. But dose it mention how this is helpful to know this? So this is how God made the universe, or how it simply randomly made. So what?
How do you count "days" before the Earth and the Sun are formed?
That puts a stopper on the young earth creationists, but not the rest of the creationists. Most creationists already subscribe to the idea that the days of Genesis were actually eras that were million or billions of years long. They believe in the big bang. They believe that the universe is 13.6 billion years old and that the earth is between 4 and 5 billion years old, but they also believe that the first man was Adam and that he lived just over 6000 years ago. That's where the fight lies: convincing creationists of evolution.
"Computer models indicate that the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times in .0000000000000000000000000000000001 (10 to the minus-34) seconds after the Big Bang explosion 13.8 billion years ago."
So, I assume the universe started out as a singularity (another blackhole from another universe, popping like a big pimple to create our universe?) But, really, my question is what is the measurement of a singularity? It has to be 100 trillion trillion times something. I assume that since a planck volume (V=4/3 pi planck length^3) is the smallest volume you can have, then it would be 100 trillion trillion times that?
and why does this editor strip out special characters like pi, etc?
In whose frame of reference though...
I thought this was discovered a long time ago - the cosmic background radiation from the big bang.
Planck is due to report it's first tranche of data in August, IIRC.
Being first still matters. As the guys who got the Nobel in 1993 for showing that the loss of energy from a pair of co-orbiting neutron stars is consistent with the expected radiation of gravity waves will be fastidious about not pointing out. While wearing big cheesy grins. And gold medals.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
GR says photons lose energy going uphill.
We see red shift in all directions.
So all directions are uphill.
Uphill both ways, barefoot in the snow, coming and going to school.
Now get that neutrino detector off my lawn.
--
To wake with a start and shudder from a lecture you are delivering
Send them all off in a spaceship together with some telephone sanitizers and advertising executives.
I think this "expansion" is actually called "inflation" - the theory suggested by Alan Guth as the explanation for the overall uniformity of the Universe ?
Plus, this article points out that most peer-reviewed journals consider theistic evolution and intelligent design to be just forms of creationism.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The theological orthodoxy cuts both ways, I'm afraid.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
On #2: Not my opinion
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.