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"Big Bang Signal" Could All Be Dust
An anonymous reader writes Scientists have shown that the swirl pattern touted as evidence of primordial gravitational waves — ripples in space and time dating to the universe's explosive birth — could instead all come from magnetically aligned dust. A new analysis of data from the Planck space telescope has concluded that the tiny silicate and carbonate particles spewed into interstellar space by dying stars could account for as much as 100 percent of the signal detected by the BICEP2 telescope and announced to great fanfare this spring. The Planck analysis is "relatively definitive in that we can't exclude that the entirety of our signal is from dust," said Brian Keating, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the BICEP2 collaboration.
So is the Universe coming, or going?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The big bang was the first "FIRST" comment
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
Well that is an understatement I'm sure.
Is it, at least, magic dust?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Conservative deniers are going to have a field day with this: "How can we trust scientists on evolution and global warming when the Big Bang turned out to be nothing more than God's dirty windshield!".
Table-ized A.I.
Who was the first troll?
Table-ized A.I.
Who was the first troll?
The God that created the Big Fart of course...
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
what the hell did i just read?
Educated stupid scientists never understand 4 sided universal timecube.
In the comments for any article related to physics, on any website, there will always be at least one comment from someone who mistakes their schizophrenia for a PhD in Physics.
I advise you, pay them no heed.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
A creature once known as a netkook, but now just a moderate level crank.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
At least we know where he stands more or less.
Even if it is all dust, the discovery is "nothing to sneeze at"!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I was just asking Tess about her act, and all she would tell me was that the show was big -- bigger on the inside than the outside. So I guess there was a lot of seating. A bunch of folderol, if you ask me. But at least we had box seats.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Planck must be a DENIER.
Indeed, someone *COUGH*..tsarkon..*COUGH* might be smoking dust.
The Planck dust measurement in pretty damning, but it is not the final word.
(1) Planck measured the dust contamination with greatest sensitivity at 353 GHz. It was not sensitive enough to measure the dust signal at 150 GHz, where BICEP was observing. They had to extrapolate the dust contribution from the higher frequency to the lower. This is actually a pretty big extrapolation, since the dust emission at 150 GHz is less than 1% of the dust emission at 353 GHz.
(2) The uncertainty in the dust emission amplitude is still pretty high, so the Planck measurement is consistent with an "all dust" model, or with a "mostly dust" model, or with a "mostly primordial, with some dust" model. It does pretty conclusively rule out a "no dust" model.
(3) They have not released the results of a joint analysis of Planck and BICEP2, which is what is necessary to actually shed some light on exactly how much of the BICEP2 signal is likely to be dust.
But it's clear that the BICEP team was being over-optimistic in their assumptions about galactic dust, which is a bummer.
One of the more interesting Nova episodes I watched, a few years ago now, focused on a group of Catholic scientists priests (Astronomers, Physicists, Biologists, etc). It was refreshing to see that even within the Catholic Church there is room for faith and science, as they are sanctioned and paid by the Church.
There are a lot of "nutters" that do abuse Religious doctrine and pound the shit out of their bibles. At least the official stance of the Catholic church acknowledges and respects science, and doesn't discount it out of hand.
It really does shine a bad light on those fringe states that continue to push for their creationist agenda in schools, when not even the Catholic Church has that stance.
I feel like you inverted the science fiction book that was the basis of Aryan propaganda of the early 20th century.
You need to read up on the following scholars: Leonard Jeffries, professor of African-American studies at the City University of New York; Wade Nobles, professor of African American studies at San Francisco State University; Frances Cress Welsing, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist; Richard King, a Los Angeles psychiatrist; and Hunter Adams, a technician at Argonne National Laboratory and author of the Portland Baseline Science Essay.
Then you will realize how ignorant you really are.
that all those big bang theorists started shaving with Occam's razor. It all rests on the
assumption that the red shift can only be caused by velocity. Because of that it's epicycles
all the way down.
Just like a lot of things. Here you go.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
I don't understand any four sided cubes...
unless you mean inside, outside, our side, your side...
Oh Crap I think I'm channeling Dr. Seuss!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I just want to say that the title on this story is absolutly horrible.
I don't think they could have dumbed it down anymore.
How about "BICEP2 Team working to qualify their results with Planck researchers"?
Not as exciting, I know, I know. I really wish news articles here would challenge us to think more.
Yahweh, of course.
"Lol, watch this! I'm gonna put this bitchin' fruit out there, and then tell those jerks who don't even know right from wrong to not eat it. When they do, I'll totally fuck over their entire race from now until the end of time and blame them for it!"
-- Genesis 3:2, Standard Slashdot Translation
Required reading for internet skeptics
When we drop something, it hits the ground and disturbs a bunch of dust kinda like dropping a large object in a pond. That explosion of dust sends particles up in the air and all over the place. To think, small bacteria and creatures live on them. Each particle..... flying through the air.
Imagine if we simply weren't the biggest thing around. What if our solar system is just a bunch of dust particles flying through the air? Sure the particles are all flying away from something and anything living on them would eventually notice that.
I think the difference is that we are smaller and already living on something elses "dust" particles. Since we are so small the microscopic things that we then see are *super small* and thus quite simple. Bacteria aren't out there building space ships they seem primitive and "dumb".
But that doesn't mean all super small things are dumb and not advanced. Thus it's quite possible that something is many many more times "smarter" than us and when observed "we" appear dumb and bacteria-like. Then to think that we ourselves then observe something that small ourselves which also appears "dumb".
Now lets change gears and mention time relativity. People experience time differently depending on how fast you are going. This is proven with GPS satellites where atomic clocks onboard match an Earth-located atomic clock upon launch, but then after moving at thousands of miles per hour in orbit, the clocks drift apart. GPS is actually coding around the known drift to fix accuracy issues. It's called "time dilation" and this isn't disputed.
I however wonder if speed isn't the only variable. What if size itself has a major bearing upon time dilation? Such that super small things experience time more slowly so that one big raindrop takes millions of perceived years for the creatures living on the particles?
Wouldn't that then explain our own situation? A bunch of such slow moving particles flying through what appears to be an empty void of nothing? What if you set off a bomb and the exploding fragments created a new universe? You'd basically see particles of various elements some on fire, some still catching on fire, some burned out, etc.
So perhaps we are so small *already* that we simply haven't been "big enough" to see how slow we really perceive time? Thus no experiment shows bacteria living in slow motion because we ourselves are already so small compared to how big some things in the universe must actually be (when all we see are planets which is just microscopic dust to these huge creatures).
This to me makes the most sense. It explains why the universe is "taking so damn long" to do anything interesting besides just continually float away from some big explosion. It explains what that big explosion could actually be (a raindrop or something hitting the ground hard). It explains why we can't see these situations in the small things around us (because we are already so small it's like splitting hairs on the scale of things).
It also explains the concept of time and how that falls into this system such that we cannot escape it. It also allows for many universes, the concept of something smarter than us, yet obviously shows that those things smarter than us aren't exactly *creating* us similar to how Humans aren't "creating" bacteria just observing it or maybe modifying it a bit genetically. Just makes sense to me.
I think we are small. :)
Never mind. Wrong kind of Stardust.
Have gnu, will travel.
Dr Seuss makes more sense than the comment thread.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I agree. Theodor not only avoided incomprehensibility, He instilled a love of reading in countless people.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
LoL.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, before making strong statements on the far side of the universe, one could expect that qualified scientifists would have better checked the properties of
what is known to be along the line of sight...
can you do that for the rest of that shitty book of violence??
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Oh hey, I'll just fix that for you:
- The universe did not come from nothing. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- The universe did not create itself. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- The universe was not created.
Cheers!
Really? With that logic we can argue nothing in the universe is created:
- A loaf of bread does not come from nothing. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- A loaf of bread does not create itself. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- A loaf of bread is not created.
No. We can trace the assembly of a loaf of bread just fine from its now-current components. We can't trace the creation of the universe. Our physics makes nonsense of the evidence we have uncovered; therefore, we do not understand that evidence. Until we do, we can't trace the universe any further.
I have no problem with yet to be solved questions, and find no need to make up stories in order to pretend to solve them. I'll wait comfortably until we figure it out, assuming we do, which is also not a given. It may be beyond our capacities, and certainly as far as this universe goes, most of the evidence our current skills allow us to work with has long since dispersed.
However, from a thermodynamics POV, the "logic" does not lead to "god", because that answer solves nothing:
- A god does not come from nothing. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- A god does not create itself. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- A god was not created.
The subtext to either series of reasoning, of course, is the "it was there all the time" sally. The difference: The universe is real, here now, and assuming it was there all the time in some form isn't a huge leap of any kind, it just asserts the status quo in regions we cannot confirm.
God (or gods), however, has/have not been demonstrated to be real, and so three leaps have to be taken: First the existence in the first place, and second, the "there all the time", and third, that this is somehow relevant to us.
I choose the simple answer: The universe, in some form, was there all the time. That could be wrong; but that's what little our current physics seem to imply.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Always thought minute particles of matter in Space cause the red-shift paradigm, and limit observable distance in the Universe. Parts of the Universe decay, parts get renewed or created. And so life and the Universe go on!
This is one of the most thoughtful and useful things I've seen posted on Slashdot for years.