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The New Telescope That Will Help Confirm Harvard's Big Bang Discovery

It'll have five times the power of the telescope that found gravitational waves.
On the left is BICEP2—the new BICEP3 will be twice as accurate. Image: National Science Foundation/Wikimedia Commons

To say that finding strong evidence the Big Bang actually happened is “pretty cool” is probably the understatement of the year, but the Harvard University team that did it isn’t ready to take a break after discovering what theoretical physicists have been looking for for decades. They've still got to prove it.

By all accounts, the team should be ready to take a very long vacation, preferably in some warm-weather locale (they spent months of each year in Antarctica working on their research). But when you make such an incredible discovery, you’re going to face scrutiny. Most who study the subject have said that the team’s discovery appears to be airtight, but some have remained skeptical precisely because the evidence appears so strong. The gravitational waves detected by the team showed up on their telescope, BICEP2, stronger than many would have predicted. Well, lucky for the team, they’ve got a brand new telescope ready to go.

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BICEP3 will be ready for deployment later this year, and is better than BICEP2 in every way, according to Chao-Lin Kuo, a Stanford University professor who has been one of the main faces of the Harvard University team. You might know him from this video:

I asked him what the point of BICEP3 was if you’ve already detected gravity waves from the Big Bang, which was the whole purpose of the project. Is this just a case of “old” technology coming through right as something new was ready? Is BICEP3 a waste? Kuo says there’s still plenty of work to be done.

“I think that confirming our result, by itself, would be huge,” he said. “An extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence.”

Already, the team seems to have solid evidence, but now that they know where to look and how to identify gravitational waves, having a new telescope with five times the power of BICEP2 doesn’t hurt. Beyond that, BICEP3 will be strong enough to “double the survey speed and sensitivity” of the Keck Array, a larger series of telescopes that has been surveying the sky since 2010.

“The BICEP2 results have been out for a couple days now, and I think the response has generally been quite positive, but some have said they want to see measurements at different frequencies,” he said. “We want to do it with better accuracy and we want to cover a bit more sky. That will decrease any uncertainty there still is.”

And that uncertainty definitely exists. Though no one has outright challenged the team’s findings, many have said there are still some remaining questions.

"First of all, I should say this is just a spectacular result, and right or wrong, it actually indicates we are right on the threshold of a completely new window into the Big Bang and what happened at the Big Bang, so it's tremendously exciting," Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada and a physicist who has proposed other theories beyond the Big Bang, told the BBC. "I have reasons for doubts about the new experiment and its results. It's not entirely convincing to me, but they have clearly seen what they claim to have seen. Verification is very important and it's wise to be a little bit skeptical at the moment when there is no confirmation. The experiment was extremely difficult, and they don't entirely explain why they are so convinced of what they claim.”

Lawrence Krauss, a researcher at Arizona State University, similarly told the New York Times that “we will need to wait before we jump up and down.”

With BICEP3, that day may come sooner rather than later.