It's useless science Friday in my head - Welcome to the show.

[Strychnine]

Can you break out a cardboard display board and have charts. We need charts. Flow charts preferably.

info: http://www.kurzweilai.net/first-dire...smic-inflation
There's more info and pics there.

http://legacy.kek.jp/intra-e/feature/2009/CMB.html

[mstng86]

Can you break out a cardboard display board and have charts. We need charts. Flow charts preferably.

[Strychnine]

Not quite. The energy did not move faster than the speed of light. What they are saying is that they have confirmed that in the beginning the boundary of the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

A classic example is a balloon. Take a balloon and put two dots on it then blow it up. The space between the dots will grow. Anything moving between the two dots (light, radio waves, etc) would be limited to the speed of light... though the balloon itself was expanding faster than the speed of light.

what the experiment did was confirm that there are similar waves on opposite sides of the universe over a distance too great for them to be the same if they just traveled at the speed of light. They had to travel at that speed while in a medium that was also expanding at an insanely incomprehensible rate... I don't think I'm doing this justice. I'll try to come up with a visual to help this one

[Ratt]

So, this basically translates to a theory that we should (at some point in the very distant future, obviously) be able to travel faster than the speed of light. If matter and other forms of energy can do so, then it should be possible for the right people to come up with a system of propulsion that could do it.

Most excellent.

[Strychnine]

And here's some more on the significance...

There is a theory, known as cosmic inflation, that says shortly after the big bang the universe was expanding faster than the speed of light. This theory made many predictions (like the universe is flat) but the most convincing one would be a direct detection of the super-luminal expanding space.

This is that later detection. We know that different spots in the sky were not able to communicate with each other since they were outside of each other's light cone. The light cone is the furtherest information could travel since nothing can travel faster than light. So what this experiment has shown is that the spacetime, the gravitational waves, are correlated in these spots as if they were communicating with each other. And the only way that is possible is if the spacetime was expanding faster than the speed of light. And this is the definition of inflation so this is why we are saying it is s confirmation of inflation.

This is one of those things worthy of a Nobel Prize

[Strychnine]

So this is evidence in favor of the gravity waves theory?

I may have started college as a physics major but I did not finish as one, so the italicized is someone else's synopsis:

The scientists said: "The long search for tensor B-modes is apparently over, and a new era of B-mode cosmology has begun."

B-mode describes a specific type of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization that's associated with gravitational waves. From these polarized waves they add not only another piece of evidence for inflation but measured a critical parameter that puts constraints on what happened during the Big Bang.

All models from this day forward will have to incorporate this newly measured value. These new models will create predictions which will then become next-generation discoveries.

Basically by confirming the existence of gravity waves they canconfirm that all forces were once unified, or pure energy - which means there is a "Grand Unifiying Theory" out there somewhere. That means that there should be a way to describe gravity in the same way we describe electromagnetism, nuclear forces, etc. which is something that has eluded physicists forever.

At the point in time (which corresponds to distance, or redshift in a spacetime universe) when the forces decouple from one another, the particles that interact with them become like seperate, non-interacting fluids. When you look at a plot of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) field, what you're seeing is the light that's reaching us now from the surface of last scattering. This is the point in time when the electroweak force decoupled and matter stopped being constantly ionized by the super-energetic photon fluid that permeated everything then.

This experiment is very similar, but we're looking at a surface which exists waaaay beyond recombination, right when inflation began and gravitation started to decouple through the Higgs mechanism. At this time, the mass distribution of the universe was very wonky (to put things rather unscientifically), and these perturbations resulted in what is analogous to a magnetic component in EM fields. The detection of such B-components is consistent with what we previously thought the Higgs field must be doing right before inflation began, and so it tells us that our idea of a grand unified theory existing just before this time is probably correct.

It also strongly reinforces the theory of gravitons.

[Sean88gt]

So, like, we are all surfers, like riding the gravity wave man.

[mstng86]

So, like, we are all surfers, like riding the gravity wave man.

[Ratt]

So this is evidence in favor of the gravity waves theory?

[Strychnine]

Long story short - in 1979 the theory of cosmic inflation was introduced and part of it was the thought that this would leave behind evidence in the form of gravitational waves. The tech did not exist at the time to even begin searching for evidence supporting the theory though...

Until the BICEP2 experiment (left)

Big Bang's Smoking Gun Found

Mar 17, 2014 11:10 AM ET // by Irene Klotz



The detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe created from nine years of WMAP data. This map represents the tiny temperature fluctuations (anisotropies) measured in the ancient cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe.


For the first time, scientists have found direct evidence of the expansion of the universe, a previously theoretical event that took place a fraction of a second after the Big Bang explosion nearly 14 billion years ago.

The clue is encoded in the primordial cosmic microwave background radiation that continues to spread through space to this day. Scientists found and measured a key polarization, or orientation, of the microwaves caused by gravitational waves, which are miniature ripples in the fabric of space.

Gravitational waves, proposed by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity nearly 100 years ago but never before proven, are believed to have originated in the Big Bang explosion and then been amplified by the universe’s inflation. “Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today,” lead researcher John Kovac, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement.

Because gravitational waves squeeze space as they travel, they imprint a specific pattern in the cosmic microwave background. Like light waves, gravitational waves have “handedness” that correlates to left- and right-skewed polarizations. Using a special telescope located at the South Pole, scientists not only detected gravitational waves in the universe’s fossil radiation; they also found that the telltale polarization signals are much stronger than expected.

“This has been like looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead we found a crowbar,” team co-leader Clem Pryke, with the University of Minnesota, said in a press release.

In addition to providing the first direct evidence of the universe’s inflation, the measurements can be used to date the process and determine how much energy it took.

Computer models indicate that the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times in .0000000000000000000000000000000001 (10 to the minus-34) seconds after the Big Bang explosion 13.8 billion years ago.

The telescope used to detect the gravitational waves is called Bicep, short for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization.

A press conference to discuss the findings is scheduled for noon today.

http://news.discovery.com/space/astronomy/big-bangs-smoking-gun-discovered-140317.htm

For the stats guys - the "data confidence" is 5.9 sigma.
5 sigma is required for a "discovery" which is about what they had when they announced the probable discovery of the Higgs Boson.

[Strychnine]

Gemini's First Image Shows a Planet Orbiting a Star 63 Light Years Away

January 8, 2014

It might not be much to look at, but this image is insanely exciting. You're looking at the first ever image of a planet, orbiting a star, over 63 light years from Earth.

Acquired by the world's most powerful planet-hunting instrument, the Gemini Planet Imager, it shows a 10-million-year-old planet called Beta Pictorus orbiting its giant parent star. It's the first such image to come from Gemini, which has been under development for over a decade but is only now producing data like this.

The Imager detects infrared radiation to readily spot young planets, whose post-formation afterglow is in that part of the spectrum, while masking light emitted by parent stars that can often interfere with images. In fact, we've written in detail about how it works in the past, so you cango read about it in depth if, like us, space telescope engineering gets you hot under the collar.

Obviously, as well as being insanely cool, images like this will help researchers understand far-off planetary system more accurately than ever before. And the best news is that, in the future, you can expect a slew of such images: currently the team is analyzing 600 other young stars and the planets that surround them, [Gemini Observatory]

Figure 1. Gemini Planet Imager’s first light image of Beta Pictoris b, a planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. The star, Beta Pictoris, is blocked in this image by a mask so its light doesn’t interfere with the light of the planet. In addition to the image, GPI obtains a spectrum from every pixel element in the field of view to allow scientists to study the planet in great detail.

Beta Pictoris b is a giant planet – several times larger than Jupiter – and is approximately ten million years old. These near-infrared images (1.5-1.8 microns) show the planet glowing in infrared light from the heat released in its formation. The bright star Beta Pictoris is hidden behind a mask in the center of the image.

http://www.gemini.edu/node/12113

[slow99]

The South Pole is a continental glacier, but the North Pole is a giant piece of ice.

Of course; that's why I clarified thinking about the north as akin to ...

[racrguy]

Thanks. So, think about the (northern) polar ice cap as so extensively frozen, that it's akin to a continental land mass? If so, that makes sense.

The South Pole is a continental glacier, but the North Pole is a giant piece of ice.

[slow99]

The big issue is that glacial melting raises sea levels bc the ice was not initially supported by the sea, but by land - it's effectively runoff into the oceans.

Thanks. So, think about the (northern) polar ice cap as so extensively frozen, that it's akin to a continental land mass? If so, that makes sense.

[Strychnine]

With ice, most of it is below the surface, like in a soda. The ice doesn't float on top, but mostly submerged until all of the forces balance. (I don't think buoyancy is the correct term since we're talking about a density difference)

Random fact: due to density differences of solid and liquid water every iceberg you see (or lone ice cube in a glass) will be just a tad more than 90% below the surface and slightly less than 10% above.