Twisted light from the beginning of time could reveal brand-new physics

[Judi Lynn]

By Mara Johnson-Groh 2 days ago



In this all-sky map from Planck, a European Space Agency mission, the towers of fiery
colors represent dust in the galaxy and beyond that has been polarized.
(Image: © ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

A twist in the universe's first light could hint that scientists need to rethink physics.

A pair of Japanese scientists looked at the polarization or orientation of light from the cosmic microwave background radiation, some of the earliest light emitted after the universe's birth. They found the polarization of photons, or light particles, might be slightly rotated from their original orientation when the light was first produced. And dark energy or dark matter may have been responsible for that rotation. (Dark energy is a hypothetical force that is flinging the universe apart, while proposed dark matter is a substance that exerts gravitational pull yet does not interact with light.)

The rotated signature of the photon polarization tells the scientists that something may have interacted with those photons — specifically something that violates a symmetry physicists call parity. This symmetry or parity says that everything looks and behaves the same way, even in a flipped system — similar to how things look in the mirror. And if the system was following this parity rule, there wouldn't be this rotation change.

Parity is shown by all subatomic particles and all forces except the weak force. However, the new results suggest that whatever the early light might have interacted with might be violating this parity.

More:
https://www.space.com/big-bang-light-twisted-new-physics

[Joinfortmill]

1. Way over my head but wow.

[nam78_two]

2. The original PRL article is fairly hard to comprehend

If you are a non-specialist:

ABSTRACT
We search for evidence of parity-violating physics in the Planck 2018 polarization data and report on a new measurement of the cosmic birefringence angle
β. The previous measurements are limited by the systematic uncertainty in the absolute polarization angles of the Planck detectors. We mitigate this systematic uncertainty completely by simultaneously determining
β and the angle miscalibration using the observed cross-correlation of the E- and B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background and the Galactic foreground emission. We show that the systematic errors are effectively mitigated and achieve a factor-of-2 smaller uncertainty than the previous measurement, finding
β=0.35±0.14 deg (68% C.L.), which excludes β=0
at 99.2% C.L. This corresponds to the statistical significance of 2.4σ.

I am not sure what space.com is, but I figure if you post it and eppur_se_muova recommends it, it must be respectable enough. I know space.com was founded by Lou Dobbs but that in itself doesn't make its content suspect. I saw that a few years ago which made me a bit dubious about being on their mailing list. But Mara Johnson-Groh writes for Nasa so I would assume her synopsis is accurate.
It must be a fairly difficult job to write synopses of articles like these for laymen.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Lou Dobbs? OMG. Enough to make one swallow one's tongue! I did not know that. Ewwwwww.

Maybe he decided to try to show the world there was more to him that the pile you might see on Fox, if you watched it. Trying to enhance his image. As if...

[nam78_two]

4. Yeah I wondered about it

But I used to be on their mailing list and it pretty much only covered astrophysics. I did do a doubletake when I first saw that-it seemed so uncharacteristic.
Maybe it is just a business venture.