Understand how the polarization of the light from cosmic background radiation influenced the early development of the universe
How the polarization of light influenced the birth of the universe.
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News •
Cosmic microwave background offers evidence of gas flowing in galaxy clusters
• Oct. 29, 2026, 12:10 PM ET (Phys.org)
Transcript
Light is a wave. And as it travels, it does its waving along a certain direction-- its polarization. Polarization, among other things, heavily influences the way light bounces and scatters. That's why horizontally polarized light reflects off a lake or car windshield, which in turn is why sunglasses with a vertical polarizing filter can block that light. And in the hot plasma of the baby universe, light was bouncing off of electrons left and right, until the plasma cooled enough to become transparent so the light could start traveling through space.
But before heading out on its 13-plus billion year journey, this light bounced one last time off of the plasma. And the direction each photon went was influenced by how its polarization interacted with the precise temperature, density, and motion of the plasma.
So if we measure the polarization of light coming from this cosmic background radiation, it can tell us about the Big Bang. The details are complicated. But roughly speaking, clumps in the plasma of the early universe created polarizations aligned along or across the direction from hot spots to cold spots in the plasma, while jiggles created polarization at 45-degree angles to the hot-cold direction. And by jiggles, I mean the stretching and squeezing of space due to gravitational waves passing through.
Anyway, starting with the results from the BICEP telescope at the South Pole, we see that while a majority of the polarization came from clumps in the early universe, about 15% of it seems to come from jiggles. And these jiggles are a big deal. They were created just fractions of fractions of a second into the life of the universe by quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field. So not only does their discovery mark the first confirmation that gravity is indeed a quantum mechanical phenomenon, but it also opens the door for us to look 380,000 years farther back than ever before into the very birth of our cosmos.
But before heading out on its 13-plus billion year journey, this light bounced one last time off of the plasma. And the direction each photon went was influenced by how its polarization interacted with the precise temperature, density, and motion of the plasma.
So if we measure the polarization of light coming from this cosmic background radiation, it can tell us about the Big Bang. The details are complicated. But roughly speaking, clumps in the plasma of the early universe created polarizations aligned along or across the direction from hot spots to cold spots in the plasma, while jiggles created polarization at 45-degree angles to the hot-cold direction. And by jiggles, I mean the stretching and squeezing of space due to gravitational waves passing through.
Anyway, starting with the results from the BICEP telescope at the South Pole, we see that while a majority of the polarization came from clumps in the early universe, about 15% of it seems to come from jiggles. And these jiggles are a big deal. They were created just fractions of fractions of a second into the life of the universe by quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field. So not only does their discovery mark the first confirmation that gravity is indeed a quantum mechanical phenomenon, but it also opens the door for us to look 380,000 years farther back than ever before into the very birth of our cosmos.
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