A Handful of Dust

Actually more like a galaxy's worth, but either way it looks like primordial B-modes may be as dead as poor Mr. Last's son.

Peter Woit has the story:

The Planck collaboration has an inimitable way of releasing important new results, they like to do it in French (see here for instance). Tonight a French Planck website contains the long-awaited news of the results from the BICEP2/Keck/Planck collaboration to reanalyze the BICEP2 data on polarized B-modes, in a way that allows proper estimation of the contribution of dust. The bottom line is that the BICEP2 claims of seeing a primordial r=.16-.20 that got a huge amount of media attention last year have been shot down. The new analysis says that r is less than .13. I don’t see a paper yet, rumor is that the paper will be on the arXiv Monday night.

OK, maybe B-modes are not dead, but it looks like the Bicep discovery is.

Very sad.

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