HOW many astronomers does it take to nail a coffin shut? On January 30th two teams of scientists—one the masters of Planck, an orbiting telescope belonging to the European Space Agency; the other the team behind BICEP2, an Earth-bound instrument at the South Pole—released, after a leak, a paper they had submitted jointly to Physical Review Letters. Its 274 authors came to bury one of the biggest scientific stories of 2014.This was the supposed discovery, reported by the BICEP2 team last March, of primordial gravitational waves—ancient ripples in space-time, produced in the first few moments after the Big Bang. Such waves would have left their imprint on the cosmic microwave background radiation, a faint afterglow of the Big Bang itself, in the form of a subtle changes in the way the microwaves are polarised.Cosmologists would dearly love to spot such waves, because they would confirm the theory of inflation, which holds that the universe underwent an extremely rapid expansion in the first instants of its existence, growing in size far faster than the speed of light. The theory solves several knotty problems in cosmology, and so most...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1zPo0KR
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