Image credit: Caltech & CTCP All rights Reserved, viahttp://preposterousuniverse.com/MCTCP/astro.php.

The paradigm of physicswith its interplay of data, theory and predictionis the most powerful in science. -Geoffrey West

So earlier this year, the BICEP2 team shook up the world by announcing the discovery of primordial gravitational waves: a signal from the earliest stages of the Universe, going all the way back tobefore the Big Bang!

Image credit:the BICEP2 collaboration, viahttp://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2014-05.

By looking at the photon polarization data, they claimed to have surpassed the gold 5 standard for announcing a discovery in physics. But recently, thats been walked back, as there could have been a systematic error at play: simple emission from our own Milky Way.

Image credit: ESA / Planck Collaboration, via http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/mpa/institute/news_archives/news1101_planck/news1101_planck-en-print.html.

Later this month, the Planck team will release their results, and either confirm or refute BICEP2. Heres where we standon the eve of that announcement.

Read the original:

The Moment of Truth for BICEP2 (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]