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ESA: No Conclusive Evidence of Big Bang Gravitational Waves
hypnosec writes: The European Space Agency has made a joint analysis of data gathered by the ground-based BICEP2 and Keck Array experiments and its own Planck satellite to try to verify previous reports of BICEP2's primordial gravitational wave detection. However, the ESA was unable to find evidence of primordial gravitational waves, and they think the earlier report was simply based on an outdated model that didn't take interstellar dust into account.
"The Milky Way is pervaded by a mixture of gas and dust shining at similar frequencies to those of the CMB, and this foreground emission affects the observation of the most ancient cosmic light. Very careful analysis is needed to separate the foreground emission from the cosmic background. Critically, interstellar dust also emits polarized light, thus affecting the CMB polarization as well. ... The BICEP2 team had chosen a field where they believed dust emission would be low, and thus interpreted the signal as likely to be cosmological. However, as soon as Planck’s maps of the polarized emission from Galactic dust were released (PDF), it was clear that this foreground contribution could be much higher than previously expected."
"The Milky Way is pervaded by a mixture of gas and dust shining at similar frequencies to those of the CMB, and this foreground emission affects the observation of the most ancient cosmic light. Very careful analysis is needed to separate the foreground emission from the cosmic background. Critically, interstellar dust also emits polarized light, thus affecting the CMB polarization as well. ... The BICEP2 team had chosen a field where they believed dust emission would be low, and thus interpreted the signal as likely to be cosmological. However, as soon as Planck’s maps of the polarized emission from Galactic dust were released (PDF), it was clear that this foreground contribution could be much higher than previously expected."
I've been working in Cosmology for 10 years now and I haven't seen a single paper talking about your "EV" theory on the archive, or in any journal that I read.
There are hundreds of alternative guesses, but very few of them make any testable predictions. It's not a surprise that scientists hold on to old theories - the burden of proof of anyone positing a change from the status quo is that they have to 1) match the correct results of the existing theory and 2) introduce a new result that the old theory doesn't match. We don't hold on to old theories out of habit, or some sense of reverence - it's far, far better for us (career wise and ego wise) if we jump into a new area early and establish results there as we get our names on new things. However most of us are quite conservative in this regard because coming up with any old crap is easy. Coming up with something that both matches existing tests and predicts new ones is hard. If you've got a proof of your pet theory doing something new and testable, and you can show it matches (say) CMB observations etc. we'd all love to see it.