"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

Dust?

[TWX]

So is the Universe coming, or going?

Re:Dust?

[Ukab the Great]

Yes.

Re:Dust?

[Beck_Neard]

There seems to be a lot of confusion about this article.

The dust only accounts for the swirl patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), not the CMB itself. In other words, the 'imprint' of gravitational waves in the CMB might be an erroneous discovery, and this is not unexpected at all, since gravitational waves have yet to be demonstrated.

But the CMB is still there, and it's still pretty strong proof of the big bang, as it always was. Nothing about this news disproves the big bang.

Re:Dust?

[JeffAtl]

I don't think the word theory (in a scientific context) means what you think it does.

But...

[pushing-robot]

Is it, at least, magic dust?

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:Cue "All we are is dust in the wind"

[ihtoit]

Less their own beliefs, they have their God to do their thinking for them and their Pope to speak for them.

These "beliefs"are pretty much spoonfed to them piecemeal, just slow enough that they don't form curiosity about what they're being told.

Re:Cue "All we are is dust in the wind"

[i kan reed]

A. The pope, in line with Catholic Orthodoxy, is not creationist. Not in the totally nutter, young earth science denialism sense, anyways.
B. Everyone believes at least a few objectively wrong things. Getting on religion for the grandiosity of the incorrect claims it makes just seems silly. In the end, big things matter less to be wrong about, not more.
C. It doesn't all come from "believing what they're told." It comes from personal feelings, intuition, common sense, and a host of other inputs as well. This is coming from a neurological perspective, not just hypothetical counter-argument. For example, there's a part of the brain responsible for causing religious experiences. Atheists tend to have much smaller brain regions for that.
D. If I should instead appeal to your ego: religiosity and intelligence both predict many of the same positive life outcomes, even though they, themselves, are inversely correlated. That's good reason to believe that religion is filling an important role for people who might be worse off without it. You can imagine yourself getting its benefits elsewhere.

Re:Cue "All we are is dust in the wind"

[fyngyrz]

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!

Re:Cue "All we are is dust in the wind"

[PvtVoid]

- The universe did not come from nothing. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- The universe did not create itself. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- The universe was created by an intelligent Creator is the sole, logical conclusion.

At least the first point above is just plain wrong, and the second is either wrong or meaningless, depending on exactly what you mean by "create itself".

Re:Cue "All we are is dust in the wind"

[buchner.johannes]

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!

Thermodynamics is a theory valid for a large number of particles, and deals with the emerging phenomena based on a statistical basis, i.e. what constitutes rare phenomena. This is not enough to deal with the early universe. Even if it was, there might be an infinite "time" or "tries" before our universe exists so we can observe it.
Also, the term "create" is vague. Arguable, one can speak of creation as early inflation expands the universe and cools the soup of radiation into massive particle. In that sense some earlier state *did* create the universe as we understand it (time, space, and matter).

Also it is not true that "The universe did not come from nothing. Thermodynamics prevents this." It is possible to create a universe from nothing. What you do is borrow energy from a quantum fluctuation. You would have to give it back in a time proportional to the energy borrowed. Then inflate the universe by 10^26 so that the quantum fluctuation becomes a size-able scale, and quantum mechanics do not apply anymore. The energy borrowed obviously necessitates a balancing energy, which is stored (as negative energy) in the curvature of the universe. In a sense, enormous inflation allows you to run away with borrowed energy.
Sorry for being brief in my explanation, but the above is not a crackpot theory. It is one that is consistent with the data of the CMB and large-scale structure correlations (e.g. galaxy clusters), and commonly presented in cosmology talks. You can find some books on the subject if you search for "universe inflation", one by Alan Guth who came up with the basic theory.

The right answer is "We do not know yet where the universe came from."
and "We do not know yet if the quest for a 'cause' makes sense in the early universe or has a testable answer. But we will continue trying."

Now it is possible to call the "creation" of the universe a god, in the Greek sense of the word. The creator. A mechanism. But it is a long way from there to argue a currently present, omnipotent but willfully acting, personally addressable God.

Re:“We were, of course, disappointed,”

[radtea]

Which sounds hard, because what can you measure changes in besides the light, which would be affected by magnetic dust?

The spectral shape of the dust signal and the CMB signal are different, so multi-frequency analysis can be used to tease out the various effects. There are various technical reasons the BICEP2 team chose a single frequency (150 MHz) but additional measurements at different frequencies (353 MHz is mentioned in TFA) would allow untangling of the two, albeit with some loss in sensitivity. This sounds like the approach that will be taken in future by various teams investigating this.

The BICEP2 team got bitten by designing their experiment around a flawed theoretical understanding of the dust distribution in our galaxy, which is too bad, but this is the way science works: we publicly test our ideas, and let others see if what we've done can stand up to scrutiny. I've worked on experiments in the design phase where the design team has missed important backgrounds: it's easier than you'd think. And I once worked on an experiment that had been taking data for two years before it was found that there was a background process that precisely aped the signal (it had been missed originally because of a dropped sign in a calculation that caused two terms to nearly cancel when they should have added up.)

In the best case we find these sorts of things before we publish. In the worst case--such as this one--after.

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.

Still some wiggle room

[PvtVoid]

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.

Nova on Catholic scientists

[CrashNBrn]

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.

Re:Nova on Catholic scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

The Catholic Church had a hand in creating the scientific method, you know. And "scientific" names are all Latin for similar reasons. Not to mention setting up the whole university system to begin with. They came up with the theory that a rational God would create a rational universe that obeyed rules that could be understood by humans when those prior had studied things more or less as a long series of special cases of cause and effect.

While people might not agree with the "rational God" part, the "rational universe that obeys rules that can be understood by humans" pretty much sums up the pursuit of science.

Horrible title

[Netdoctor]

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.