Rumours that Gravitational waves have been detected

This detailed map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is created from seven years worth of data. 

The colour variations correspond to temperature variations in the young universe: the seeds for stars and galaxies observed today. 

Credit: NASA

Last week the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) stated rather nonchalantly that they will be hosting a press conference on Monday, March 17th, to announce a "major discovery."

Without a potential topic for journalists to muse on, this was as melodramatic as it got but then the Guardian posted an article on the subject and the rumours went into overdrive.

The speculation is this: a U.S. team is on the verge of confirming they have detected primordial gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime that carry echoes of the big bang nearly 14 billion years ago.

If there is evidence for gravitational waves, it will be a landmark discovery, ultimately changing the face of physics.

Not only are gravitational waves the last untested prediction of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, but primordial gravitational waves will allow astronomers to glimpse the universe in its infancy.

"It's been called the Holy Grail of cosmology," Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist from University College London, told reporters.

"It would be a real major, major, major discovery." Any convincing evidence would almost certainly lead to a Nobel prize.

The signal is rumoured to have been found by a telescope known as BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization), which scans the sky from the south pole, looking for a subtle effect in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): the radiation released 380,000 years after the big bang when space became transparent to light and photons were allowed to travel freely across the universe.

The South Pole Telescope (left) and BICEP (right). Credit: Dana Hrubes

While the CMB has been mapped in exquisite detail, astronomers think that hidden within the map is a second fingerprint, which would reveal gravitational waves.

Its radiation was scattered toward us from the universe's earliest atoms, similar to the way blue light is scattered toward us from the atoms in the sky and just as the sky is slightly polarized, the waves have a preferred orientation, so is the CMB (on the level of a few percent).

Cosmologists are digging through the data, searching for a subtle twist in the polarized light, known as B-modes.

If a gravitational wave moves through the fabric of spacetime, it will squeeze spacetime in one direction (the universe will look a little hotter) and stretch it in another (the universe will look a little cooler).

The photons will scatter with a preferred direction, leaving a slightly polarized imprint on the CMB, due to the passing gravitational wave.

Andrew Jaffe

"If a detection has been made, it is extraordinarily exciting," Andrew Jaffe, a cosmologist from Imperial College, London, told reporters.

"This is the real big tick-box that we have been waiting for. It will tell us something incredibly fundamental about what was happening when the universe was only 10-34 seconds old."