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Big Bang

Cosmologists celebrated the new year by launching a new experiment on a balloon in Antarctica to investigate the Big Bang.

A set of six telescopes known as Spider, for Suborbital Polarimeter for Inflation, Dust and the Epoch of Reionization, will circle the continent for the next 20 days, observing a haze of faint microwave radio waves that envelop space and are thought to be the fading remnants of the primordial fireball in which it all started 13.8 billion years ago.

The telescopes, built by an international collaboration led by physicists from Caltech and Princeton, are designed to detect faint curlicues in the polarization of the microwaves. According to a widely held theory known as inflation, such curls would have been caused by violent disruptions of space-time when the universe as we know it began expanding, a sliver of a moment after time as we think we understand it began.

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Spider is a sister experiment to another Caltech-based collaboration known as Bicep, whose investigators made headlines last spring when they announced they had recorded the curlicues in one patch of sky from a telescope at the South Pole, confirming inflation. The scientists later had to concede that most or all of their signal could have been caused by interstellar dust.

Spider, on this flight, will observe the microwaves in two wavelengths (“colors” in radio astronomy jargon) that will allow them to distinguish dust from primordial space-time ripples. It will also have the advantage of being above the atmosphere.

The Bicep team is just now installing the fourth generation of telescopes at the South Pole and is also observing in multiple wavelengths. Bicep2, which made the news last spring, looked at only one wavelength.

Both experiments were conceived by Andrew Lange, a Caltech astronomer who died in 2010. The Spider experiment was supposed to complete the first of two flights last year, but after the equipment was shipped to McMurdo Station, run by the National Science Foundation, the government shut down.

“It took the better part of half the year to get all our equipment back from the field and the rest of the year to refurbish and test it all,” said William Jones of Princeton, a leader of the Spider experiment, in an email from Antarctica a few hours before the launch.

Subsequently, the team reported that the instrument was at altitude and doing well

/new york times/