"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.

Comments

Cue "All we are is dust in the wind"

[Tablizer]

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!".

Re: Dust? tsarkon reports

[The Other White Meat]

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.