Astrophysicists Plan To Announce A Major Discovery Tomorrow

[Retz]

Astrophysicists Plan To Announce A Major Discovery Tomorrow



Scientists will announce a "major discovery" on Monday, March 17, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, according to a news release from the institution.
The big news will be delivered at a press conference, streamed live starting at 11:55 a.m. EDT at this link. Business Insider will also be covering the announcement.

Rumors surrounding the topic of the discovery are starting to fly, but nothing has been confirmed and the media alert offered no hints.

The Guardian reports on speculation that the discovery has to do with finding of evidence of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were produced in the early universe. The imprint they left when the universe was born 13.82 billion years ago would give us an idea of what the universe was like when it just came into existence.

According to The Guardian: "The signal is rumored to have been found by a specialized telescope called Bicep (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) at the south pole."

Gravitational waves were the last untested prediction of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

"It's been called the Holy Grail of cosmology," Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist from University College London, told The Guardian. "It would be a real major, major, major discovery."

There are still reasons not to get ahead of ourselves.

Even if they do announce they've discovered these signatures of the early universe, that data will need to be scrutinized by other scientists and confirmed by other experiments.

Phil Plait, who writes Slate's Bad Astronomy blog, said in a Facebook post that he will not speculate on the discovery. "If the rumors are false," he wrote, "then I've wasted my time, and that of others, and weakened the overall public appreciation of astronomy."

It's still fun to guess.

Source: Astrophysicists Plan To Announce A Major Discovery Tomorrow | Business Insider

Astrophysicists Plan To Announce A Major Discovery Tomorrow | Business Insider

[joemarski]

"It's been called the Holy Grail of cosmology,"

Sir Retz, alam ko na kung ano ito, hehehe.
"Cosmology" daw eh... eh di ba "cosmic" 'yun?

Si Ma'm Cathy nagpalit na ng handle name.
Naging Cosmic_Girl na!!! Hehehe, galing ko!
Talo ko 'yang mga Astrophysicists na 'yan!!! :1stplace:

:electricf:

[basti08]

Nosebleed ampota! Sumakit lang ulo ko.

[Retz]

"It's been called the Holy Grail of cosmology,"

Sir Retz, alam ko na kung ano ito, hehehe.
"Cosmology" daw eh... eh di ba "cosmic" 'yun?

Si Ma'm Cathy nagpalit na ng handle name.
Naging Cosmic_Girl na!!! Hehehe, galing ko!
Talo ko 'yang mga Astrophysicists na 'yan!!! :1stplace:

:electricf:

Gravitational waves sir joemarski! meron pala pinag mulan universe natin.



Gravitational waves discovery: 'We have a first tantalising glimpse of the cosmic birth pangs' | Science | The Observer

[greenlyt]

^
sinong astrophysicist yan sir Retz?
si Dr. Emmet Brown ba ?

[chua_riwap]

retz, pang kalawakan ka rin pala......

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[greenlyt]

hindi lang pang sports pang kalawakan pa si sir Retz
hirap ng ma-aruk ang kaisipan ni sir Retz

[Altis6453]

Huh?

So the announcement has to do with the confirmation that the universe "came into being" or "had an original state" 13.2 Billion years ago? Ho hum....

I thought they discovered intelligent life on another planet...or sana, a parallel dimension where we all have an evil twin!

[safeorigin]

Hmmm... I'll try to explain this, then.

When they use specialized telescope to see distant objects in space, the further it is away from us, the older the thing is you are looking at. We know that light travels at a constant speed of about 300,000 km per second. So, pretend that a friend took a photo of a seed from 300 trillion kilometers away and sent it to you via mail. At the same time, you planted a similar seed in your backyard. Let's imagine that the mail truck your friend hired to deliver the photo travels at the speed of light. By the time the photo of the seed arrives to you, the seed you planted in your backyard is already a tree, and a pretty big one. And that took almost 32 years. Thus, we can say that our friend was about 32 light years away from us.

The discovery on the other hand is like a photo of what happened 10^-32 seconds after the Big Bang. Of course, there's no "matter" as we know it yet. Just blobs of energy racing on every direction. Gravity creates distortions in time and space. And because light travels through it, light is also distorted leaving a "finger print" of the early universe that was recently observed.

And it looks like this:

[donbuggy]

"The Horrendous Space Kablooie".



Calvin and Hobbes Comic Strip, May 05, 1991 on GoComics.com