The much-hyped discovery of primordial “gravitational waves” in a 2014 study has been countered by the scientists.
The controversial research supporting the Big Bang theory has claimed of finding the evidence, i.e. primordial “gravitational waves”, of the rapid expansion of the early universe.
But a combined analysis of data collected from the Planck satellite of European Space Agency (ESA), Keck Array experiments and the ground-based BICEP2 have not uncovered the supportive evidence of primordial gravitational waves.
The scientists associated with Planck satellite, which examined the Cosmic Microwave Background, claimed that it was not the cosmic inflation that caused the apparent gravitational waves as earlier believed, but just space dust.
In March 2014, the researchers behind the US-led BICEP2 project at the South Pole Station said that the gravitational waves proved the “first big tremors of the Big Bang” nearly 13.8 billion years ago.
According to the BICEP2 team, the pattern observed by them in polarized light in a tiny sky patch that originated in the primordial gravitational waves that astronomers believed would be available if cosmic inflation had occurred.
However, the Planck scientists had in September last year revealed new information showing polarized dust emissions were more widespread than earlier believed.
Planck and BICEP2 scientists jointly conducted a study using the latest data from the Keck Array and found that the same effect can be produced by interstellar dust in our own Milky Way galaxy.
Jean-Loup Puget, principal investigator of Planck’s HFI instrument at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, said, “So, unfortunately, we have not been able to confirm that the signal is an imprint of cosmic inflation.”
The researchers, however, noted that the cosmic inflation still remains an open question.
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