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The Moment of Truth For BICEP2
StartsWithABang writes: Earlier this year, the BICEP2 team shook up the world by announcing the discovery of primordial gravitational waves: a signal from the earliest stages of the Universe, going all the way back to before the Big Bang! By looking at the photon polarization data, they claimed to have surpassed the gold "5 Sigma" standard for announcing a discovery in physics. But recently, that's been walked back, as there could have been a systematic error at play: simple emission from our own Milky Way. Later this month, the Planck team will release their results, and either confirm or refute BICEP2. Here's where we stand on the eve of that announcement.
The funny thing is that there is a meeting in Italy this week to discuss the Planck polarization result. Except that the Planck team doesn't have the result ready yet, for reasons they are not explaining. To make matters worse, there is no internet access at the venue, so the rest of the world is hearing about it primarily through Twitter feeds. The Planck team should be seriously embarrassed to cock up a major announcement as badly as they have.
Regardles, Planck is releasing its polarization measurements in three weeks, on December 22. Get back to us then.