ISLAMABAD (Web Desk) – There was quite a buzz last year when a team of astronomers claimed to have found an evidence for primordial gravitational waves, believed to have been produced when the universe underwent a rapid period of growth spurt, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
The discovery of gravitational waves is crucial to many of the theories regarding the early universe. However, a press release made by the European Space Agency (ESA) states that what had been detected by the team was just an optical illusion.
ESA released a statement on January 30 saying that a joint analysis of data received from the Planck satellite, BICEP2 and Keck Array experiments has found that there is no conclusive evidence of these primordial gravitational waves.
Powerful telescopes such as the Planck and BICEP2 have been put to use by astronomers to detect signs of these waves in the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, the left-over radiation that was emitted 380,000 years after the Big Bang that led to the formation of the universe about 14 billion years ago, and which now permeates the cosmos. Theoretically, the waves would have produced a swirly pattern in the CMB, dubbed the B-mode polarization, according to what astronomers reportedly discovered in March last year.
However, the European Space agency said that the B-mode polarization in the CMB that the BICEP2 measured was not caused by the presence of these gravitational waves but rather of obscuring space dust.The dust in the Milky Way that emits near-infrared light and has the same characteristics as the microwave background appeared to have confused the scientists’ observation.
The results were not treated as a great surprise because the supposed discovery of the gravitational waves in 2014 has been the subject of heavy scrutiny by many scientists already.
