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Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Sam Connolly answered on 19 Jun 2014:
I guess the gravitational waves you’re thinking of were the ones that left a mark in the light from something called the ‘Cosmic Microwave Background’, which is light from the big band still left over in space – it shows us what the universe looked like just after the big bang. This discovery doesn’t necessarily prove that there are other Universes though, the main theory it supports is something called ‘inflation’. We know that the universe is expanding, because almost everything in space is moving away from us (‘redshifted’), but to explain certain things we see, including the Cosmic Microwave Background, there is a theory that the universe was expanding much, much faster than it is now for a little while, just after the big bang. This theory is called inflation and is the theory supported by the detection of gravitational waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background. What you might be thinking of, though, is that there is a bit of the Cosmic Microwave Background in one direction that shows that a bit of our universe was slightly hotter than the rest of it just after the big bang. Some scientists think that this may be another universe ‘pressing’ on ours, which would support the idea of other universes. No one’s sure if that’s the right explanation yet, but it would be cool if it was!
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Sarah Casewell answered on 19 Jun 2014:
The gravitational wave result is really interesting, but a lot of scientists are still working on it to try to figure out what it really means! Some of the first results didn’t take into account all the possible issues with the observations, so other groups have now redone the analysis.
Over the next few years it’ll become much more clear – although I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to show that there are other universes.
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Roberto Trotta answered on 19 Jun 2014:
A team of scientist used a telescope at the South Pole called BICEP 2 to observed light coming from very near the Big Bang. In March they announced that they had found tiny ripples in this light, that were the consequence of something called “gravitational waves” produced by the Big Bang. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself!
So this was a big discovery, because it gave new evidence about how the Big Bang happened, and confirmed the ideas of Einstein about gravity.
BUT! In the meantime, other scientists have looked at those results and have found that perhaps what BICEP2 saw are not ripples from the dawn of the Universe, but just a confusing signal coming from dust in our own Milky Way. We are no longer so sure that this discovery is real, which is disappointing, but it shows how science works: people check what other scientists have done to make sure it’s absolutely right, and if it’s not you have to start all over again.
That’s how science improves!
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