The next decade will be an exciting one for Australian astronomy, as we probe the heavens for answers to age old questions.
New data reveals no evidence of gravitational waves in the early universe, as observed by the BICEP2 radio telescope (pictured) near the South Pole.
teffen Richter, Harvard University
One of this century’s greatest potential discoveries concerning the origins of the universe has now fallen to galactic dust. That’s according to a new joint-analysis of all the existing data – including…
Planck telescope and the Cosmic microwave background.
ESA and Planck
In March, scientists working on the BICEP2 experiment, a microwave telescope based at the South Pole, announced that they had seen ‘gravity waves’ from the early universe, created just after the Big Bang…
There’s a lot of dust between us and the edge of the universe.
H Raab/Flickr
It’s almost three months since a team of scientists announced it had detected polarised light from the afterglow of the Big Bang. But questions are still being asked about whether cosmic dust may have…
BICEP2 is on the roof of the building on the left.
Rashmi Sudiwala
The astronomical instrument BICEP2 was deployed at the South Pole in 2009 to look for evidence that would support the theory of inflation, which tries to explain how the universe looked a trillionth of…
Anthony Gormley should have put the Quantum Cloud in a box.
lwr
Physics is on the front pages of newspapers around the world. This time it is because of the announcement made by a team of scientists who seem to have found indirect evidence for the existence of “primordial…
Graduate student Justus Brevik testing the BICEP2 used to find evidence of cosmic inflation nearly 14 billion years ago.
EPA/Steffen Richter/Harvard University
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in the US have announced overnight what they believe is the indirect detection of gravitational waves in the afterglow of the Big Bang. The…
We know gravity waves exist but just haven’t detected any… yet.
www.shutterstock.com
Our unfolding understanding of the universe is marked by epic searches and we are now on the brink of discovering something that has escaped detection for many years. The search for gravity waves has been…
The search for gravitational waves is far more than just a novelty.
msmail
In my previous article we discussed the “who, what, when, where and how” of the worldwide gravitational wave detection effort. The observant observer will have noticed we’re still missing the “why”. Why…
The global push to detect gravitational waves could provide an enormous return for science.
Wikimedia Commons
Albert Einstein made an executive decision to revolutionise our understanding of gravity in a paper published in 1916. Nearly 100 years on, a key prediction of Einstein’s theory has eluded direct detection…
There’s more to gravity than apples falling from trees.
Cea
I have spent almost 40 years trying to detect gravity waves. When I started there were just a few of us working away in university labs. Today 1,000 physicists working with billion-dollar observatories…
We know they’re out there, and now we’re closer than ever to finding gravity waves.
NASA
Detecting gravity waves is a major goal for astrophysicists. We know they should be there, but we haven’t found them yet. But today we are one step closer. By literally squeezing light on a quantum level…