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Matteo Cantiello edited Dust.tex
over 9 years ago
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But was it really a fast-growing baby universe what BICEP2 observed? Or something more mundane
as like the effect of dust? To collect the light of the CMB (cosmic microwave background, the elusive echo of the Big Bang), BICEP2 had to look with telescopes through the window glass of our Galaxy. And it turns out that this window is not as clean as previously thought, the dirt being small dust particles. These dust particles modifiy a particular property of light called polarization, which incidentally is the same proxy used to detect the existence of an inflation period. The specific signature that the scientists are after is called B-mode polarization, and could either have been imprinted by the gravitational waves associated with inflation right after the Big Bang, which occurred about 13.5 billion years ago, or created by the presence of dust as the ancient light of the CMB finally passed through the Milky Way before reaching the telescopes.