A long held belief by scientists that the universe began to rapidly expand at the dawn of time may have been confirmed by a telescope that UC San Diego helped build at the South Pole to study the earliest moments of the cosmos.
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced Monday that the BICEP 2 telescope might have detected the aftermath of the “cosmic inflation” that they think occurred just after the universe arose 13.8 billion years ago in the so-called Big Bang.
This period of inflation appears to have generated waves of gravity that left a swirl-like imprint on light from the Big Bang. The telescope saw those swirls in what could be an important clue about how the universe started.
The finding strengthens scientists support of the Big Bang theory, although it’s likely to be challenged by theologians, who see the hand of a divine creater in the rise of the universe.
The discovery was made by a coalition of scientists from Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Minnesota, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“If our discovery can be confirmed, we will have detected inflation’s imprimatur -- the fingerprint of the Big Bang,” said Brian Keating, a UC San Diego physicist who helped design, build and analyze data from the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) telescope. Keating, 42, also co-created it’s predecessor, BICEP1.
The news brought similar remarks from Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicst at Arizona State University who was not involved in the work. Krauss said the apparent breakthrough “gives us a window on the universe at the very beginning,” when it was far less than one-trillionth of a second old. “You can see back to the beginning of time.”
Harvard announced in advance in news release that says that the BICEP 2 collaboration had resulted in “the first evidence for this cosmic inflation. Their data also represent the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the ‘first tremors of the Big Bang.’ Finally, the data confirm a deep connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity.’ “
Harvard added that, "Since the cosmic microwave background is a form of light, it exhibits all the properties of light, including polarization. On Earth, sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere and becomes polarized, which is why polarized sunglasses help reduce glare. In space, the cosmic wave background was scattered by atoms and electrons and became polarized, too.
Jamie Bock of Caltech said in the release, "Our team hunted for a special type of polarization call 'B-modes,' which represents a twisting or 'curl' pattern in the polarized orientations of the ancient light."
Scientists, philosophers and theologians have been debating the nature and origin of the universe for centuries. During the Middle Ages, there was sharp disagreement over whether the universe is finite or infinite. Over time, evidence emerged that there is widespread movement in the cosmos. Then in 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered strong evidence that the universe is expanding when he observed that galaxies were moving away from Earth. He made the discovery from the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, helping establish Southern California as a hotbed for cosmology.
Two years later,
Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest and cosmologist from Belguim, published a scientific paper that proposed that the observable universe was expanding, and that it had arisen from an infintesimal amount of hot, dense matter dubbed the “singularity.” His proposal became known as the Big Bang theory, and it rocked physics.
Many religious figures disputed the finding, stressing that the universe was made by a divine creator. Lemaître later addressed their claims, saying, “As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being ... For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God ... It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe.”
But Lemaître admitted that his idea had limitations because it didn’t deal with the question of what exisited before the Big Bang, which he called “a day without a yesterday.”
Scientists have come to agree with the basic thrust of Lemaître’s proposal. But there are many aspects of the theory that have yet to be fleshed out, including the precise details of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.
In 1980, MIT physicist Alan Guth proposed that the universe underwent a brief but rapid and massive expansion -- or cosmic inflation -- less than one second after the singularity. It’s theorized that the expansion produced forms of energy known as gravitational waves that rippled through space and time, subtly altering the appearance of light from the Big Bang. Many people have been trying to prove the idea, including UC San Diego’s Keating, who created the BICEP1 telescope to study the afterglow of the Big Bang.
With support from the National Science Foundation, Keating used BICEP1 to study the cosmos from 2006 to 2008. Then he helped develop a more powerful successor, BICEP2.
Keating said the telescope “scanned back and forth like a sentinel in the cold polar night.”
It became apparent in recent months that the data BICEP2 collected could might represent one of the biggest discoveries in physics in years.
“Our team started to realize there was a signal there,” Keating said. “We detected a signature that stood the test of relentless checks, months of cross checks by lots of eminent scientists throughout the country. This was a very intense period of scrutiny, because the first order of business is to analyze the data in a way that is meticulous.”
Harvard theorist Avi Loeb said the findings provide “new insights into some of our most basic questions: Why do we exist? How did the universe begin?”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.