In March, a team of astronomers announced that they caught primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, which they believed was left over from the Big Bang. This was one of the findings that helped best solidify the Big Bang theory's standing in the study of the creation of the universe.
Some scientists have expressed skepticism and they believe that the finding translates to patterns of dust created by our own Milky Way galaxy. "It could be possible all the signal was coming from dust. Not that one could be sure, but that was a possibility. That was a big letdown for me," said Astrophysicist Matias Zaldarriaga of the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey.
In a new study led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, some new information about the Milky Way dust has come to light. The team does not rule out the possibility of foreground dust contamination.
The issue whether what they measured comes from gravity waves in the early universe or from the dust remains unresolved, said Alan Guth, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who came up with the inflation idea in the late 1970s.
Andrei Linde, a theoretical physicist from Stanford University said, "Whatever we learn will be hugely important for the further development of cosmology, and we are going to know the final answer before too long."
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