BICEP2 Post Big Bang Discovery: Evidence spotted for universe's early expansion

In this 2007 photo provided by Steffen Richter, the sun sets behind the BICEP2 telescope, foreground, and the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica. 

In the faint glowing remains of the Big Bang, scientists found "smoking gun" evidence that the universe began with a split-second of astonishingly rapid growth from a seed far smaller than an atom. 

To find a pattern of polarization in the faint light left over from the Big Bang, astronomers scanned about 2 percent of the sky for three years with the BICEP2 at the south pole, chosen for its very dry air to aid in the observations, said the leader of the collaboration, John Kovac of Harvard. 

Credit: AP Photo/Steffen Richter

The universe was born almost 14 billion years ago, exploding into existence in an event called the Big Bang.

Now researchers say they've spotted evidence that a split-second later, the expansion of the cosmos began with a powerful jump-start.

Experts called the discovery a major advance if confirmed by others. Although many scientists already believed that initial, extremely rapid growth spurt happened, finding this evidence has been a key goal in the study of the universe.

Researchers reported Monday that they did it by peering into the faint light that remains from the Big Bang.

Lawrence Krauss

If verified, the discovery "gives us a window on the universe at the very beginning," when it was far less than one-trillionth of a second old, said theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, who was not involved in the work.

"It's just amazing," he said. "You can see back to the beginning of time."

Alan Guth

Another outside expert, physicist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said the finding already suggests that some ideas about the rapid expansion of the universe can be ruled out.

Right after the Big Bang, the universe was a hot soup of particles.

It took about 380,000 years to cool enough that the particles could form atoms, then stars and galaxies.

Billions of years later, planets formed from gas and dust that were orbiting stars. The universe has continued to spread out.

This image provided by the BICEP2 Collaboration shows slight temperature fluctuations, indicated by variations in colour, of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) of a small patch of sky and the orientation of its polarisation, shown as short black lines.

Researchers say since the CMB is a form of light, it exhibits all the properties of light, including polarisation. 

The changes in a particular type of polarisation, indicated here, are theorised to be caused by gravitational waves. 

These waves are signals of an extremely rapid inflation of the universe in its first moments. 

Credit: AP Photo/BICEP2 Collaboration

Krauss said he thinks the new finding could rank with the greatest discoveries about the universe over the last 25 years, such as the Nobel prize-winning discovery that the universe's expansion is accelerating.

The new results were announced by a collaboration that includes researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The team plans to submit its results to a scientific journal this week, said its leader, John Kovac of Harvard.

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What is the universe expanding into?

"Since astronomers know that the Universe is expanding, what's it expanding into? What's outside of the Universe?"

Ask any astronomer and you'll get an unsatisfying answer. We give you the same unsatisfying answer, but really explain it, so your unsatisfaction doesn't haunt you any more.

The short answer is that this is a nonsense question, the Universe isn't expanding into anything, it's just expanding.

The definition of the Universe is that it contains everything. If something was outside the Universe, it would also be part of the Universe too.

Outside of that? Still Universe. Out side of THAT? Also more Universe. It's Universe all the way down.

Either the Universe is infinite, going on forever, or its finite, with a limited volume. In either case, the Universe has no edge.

When we imagine the Universe expanding after the Big Bang, we imagine an explosion, with a spray of matter coming from a single point. But this analogy isn't accurate.

A better analogy is the surface of an expanding balloon. Not the 3 dimensional balloon, just its 2 dimensional surface.

If you were an ant crawling around the surface of a huge balloon, and the balloon was your whole universe, you would see the balloon as essentially flat under your feet.

Imagine the balloon is inflating. In every direction you look, other ants are moving away from you. The further they are, the faster away they're moving.

Even though it feels like a flat surface, walk in any direction long enough and you'd return to your starting point.

Representation of the timeline of the universe over 13.7 billion years, and the expansion in the universe that followed. 

Credit: NASA /WMAP Science Team.

You might imagine a growing circle and wonder what it's expanding into. But that's a nonsense question.

There's no direction you could crawl that would get you outside the surface.

Your 2-dimensional ant brain can't comprehend an expanding 3-dimensional object.

There may be a center to the balloon, but there's no center to the surface. Just a shape that extends in all directions and wraps in upon itself and yet, your journey to make one lap around the balloon takes longer and longer as the balloon gets more inflated.

To better understand how this relates to our Universe, we need to scale things up by one dimension, from a 2-d surface embedded in a 3-d world, to a 3-d volume embedded within a 4-d universe.

Astronomers think that if you travel in any direction far enough, you'll return to your starting position. If you could stare far enough into space, you would be looking at the back of your own head.

Watch the video for the full story.

Ice Melt may explain Antarctica's sea ice expansion

Climate change is expanding Antarctica's sea ice, according to a scientific study in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The paradoxical phenomenon is thought to be caused by relatively cold plumes of fresh water derived from melting beneath the Antarctic ice shelves.

This melt water has a relatively low density, so it accumulates in the top layer of the ocean.

The cool surface waters then re-freeze more easily during Autumn and Winter.

This explains the observed peak in sea ice during these seasons, a team from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) says in its peer-reviewed paper.

Climate scientists have been intrigued by observations that Antarctic sea ice shows a small but statistically significant expansion of about 1.9% per decade since 1985, while sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking over past decades.

The researchers from the KNMI suggest the "negative feedback" effect outlined in their study is expected to continue into the future.

They tried to reproduce the observed changes in a computer-based climate model.

The sea ice expanded during Southern Hemisphere autumn and winter in response to the development of this fresh, cool surface layer, which floated on the denser, warmer salty sea water below.

Richard Bintanja

This fresh water is ultimately derived from enhanced melting at the base of the Antarctic ice shelves.

"Sea ice around Antarctica is increasing despite the warming global climate," said the study's lead author Richard Bintanja (Bintanja.NL), from the KNMI.

"This is caused by melting of the ice sheets from below," he told the Reuters news agency.

But there are other plausible explanations for Antarctic sea-ice expansion.

Paul Holland of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) stuck to his findings last year that a shift in winds linked to climate change was blowing ice away from the coast, allowing exposed water in some areas to freeze and make yet more ice.

Paul Holland

"The possibility remains that the real increase is the sum of wind-driven and melt water-driven effects, of course. That would be my best guess, with the melt water effect being the smaller of the two," he told the London Science Media Centre.

The study in Nature Geoscience also asserts that the cool melt water layer may limit the amount of water sucked from the oceans that falls as snow on Antarctica. Cold air can hold less moisture than warm air.

China Launches their own GPS satellites with Military Capability

China has launched commercial and public services across the Asia-Pacific region on its domestic satellite navigation network built to rival and negate their dependency on the US global positioning system (GPS).

The Beidou, or compass, system started providing services to civilians in the region on Thursday and is expected to provide global coverage by 2020, state media reported.

Ran Chengqi, spokesman for the China Satellite Navigation Office said the system's performance was "comparable" to GPS, the China Daily reported.

"Signals from Beidou can be received in countries such as Australia," he said. It is the latest accomplishment in space technology for China, which aims to build a space station by the end of the decade and eventually send a manned mission to the moon.

China sees the multi-billion-dollar programme as a symbol of its rising global stature, growing technical expertise and a further step on their expansion plans towards global domination.

The Beidou system comprises 16 navigation satellites and four experimental satellites, the paper said. Ran added that the system would ultimately provide global navigation, positioning and timing services.

The start of commercial services comes a year after Beidou began a limited positioning service for China and adjacent areas.

Big Bang Expansion

Consumerism: Humans are 'eating the future'

We're often a gloomy lot, with many of us insisting that there's nothing we can do personally about global warming, or that the human race is over-running the planet like a plague.

Unfortunately, according to leading ecologists speaking this week in Albuquerque at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, few of us realise that the main cause of the current environmental crisis is 'human nature' and our own activities.

More specifically, all we're doing is what all other creatures have ever done to survive, selfishly expanding into whatever territory is available and using up whatever resources are available.

Like a bacterial culture growing in a Petri dish till all food sources and nutrients are used up. What happens then, of course, is that the bugs then die in a sea of their own waste.

Earth dead by 2025
One speaker in Albuquerque, epidemiologist Warren Hern of the University of Colorado at Boulder, even likened the expansion of human cities to the growth and spread of cancer, predicting "death" of the Earth in about 2025.

He points out that like the accelerated growth of a cancer, the human population has quadrupled in the past 100 years, and at this rate will reach a size in 2025 that leads to global collapse and catastrophe.

Juggernaut mentality
What's worse, is that not only are we simply doing what all creatures do: we're doing it better on an industrial scale. In recent times we're doing it even faster because of changes in society that encourage and celebrate conspicuous and excessive consumption, with a Juggernaut mentality.

Fill and consume Habitat
"Biologists have shown that it's a natural tendency of living creatures to fill up all available habitat and use up all available resources," says William Rees of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

"That's what underlies Darwinian evolution, and species that do it best are the ones that survive, but we do it better than any other species," he told me prior to the conference.
Spreading humans

Domination and Expansion
Although we like to think of ourselves as civilised thinkers, we're subconsciously still driven by an impulse for survival, domination and expansion. This is an impulse which now finds expression in the idea that inexorable economic growth is the answer to everything, and, given time, will redress all the world's existing inequalities.

Finite Resources
The problem with that, according to Rees and Hern, is that it fails to recognise that the physical resources to fuel this growth are finite. "We're still driven by growing and expanding, so we will use up all the oil, we will use up all the coal, and we will keep going till we fill the Petri dish and pollute ourselves out of existence," he says.