Back in March, Twig Newsdesk reported on a story
that was taking the world of cosmology by storm. A team of scientists studying data from a
remote microwave telescope called BICEP2 announced that they appeared to have
found something remarkable: minute traces of a signal produced moments after
the Big Bang.
Their discovery supported hypotheses made
decades ago by astrophysicists Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, who proposed that,
in the first fractions of a second after it came into existence, the Universe
expanded exponentially before dropping to a slower rate of expansion. This concept
– known as inflation theory – helped to reconcile certain puzzling aspects of the
existing Big Bang model, and BICEP2’s findings seemed to offer the first
experimental proof that the theory was accurate. Consequently, it was viewed as
a major scientific milestone, and Nobel prizes were predicted for those
involved.
However enthusiasm has since cooled,
following a pair of new studies that cast doubt on the initial report’s
conclusions. After reviewing the research, independent academics at Princeton
University and the Institute for Advanced Study discovered flaws in the
original findings, and concluded that the evidence was not strong enough to
constitute a clear breakthrough. It turns out that the signal that caused so
much excitement may in fact have been nothing more than interference caused by ordinary
space dust, and this has forced the BICEP2 scientists to revise their original
claims. It’s a disappointing development, but the search for new evidence will
continue – and hopefully next time, the claims will stand up to close
inspection.
Watch Nuclear Fusion: The Hot and Cold Science to find out about another
scientific breakthrough that turned out not to be quite as important as first
thought…
