We may know a little bit more about our Universe's origins, dark matter and dark energy, thanks to some recent observations made by a team of scientists using a telescope in Chile's Atacama desert. The team is also referred to as POLARBEAR.
The POLARBEAR collaboration worked on measuring radiation left over from the Big Bang. This radiation cooled down after that event and expanded with the Universe to become microwaves. This created the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, which acts as the background light of the Universe.
POLARBEAR created new instruments that measured the CMB with more sensitivity and detail than ever before. These instruments determined the direction of the CMB's electrical field from multiple positions across the sky. This created a map of that light at an unprecedented high resolution.
"It's a really important milestone," says Kam Arnold, one of the authors of the report "We're in a new regime of more powerful, precision cosmology."
Within that light, the POLARBEAR team found wavy signatures associated with B-modes, signals associated with the CMB. These waves show that things like dark matter and neutrinos could have warped the CMB. If confirmed, this serves as proof of the existence of dark matter, something scientists have spent decades trying to find.
Most recently, a team of scientists at the University of Leicester in England believe that they found such proof after studying over 15 years of data from the XMM-Newton space observatory. This group found a signal in the X-ray band of the sky, that suggested the presence of axions, which are particles associated with dark matter.
Before that, a team of scientists with BICEP2 shocked the world by stating they'd found a signature of gravitational waves related to cosmic inflation, proving a theory that states that the Universe quickly expanded for a few moments right after the Big Bang. However, that research was mostly debunked, when others suggested that particles of dust may have distorted the readings.
POLARBEAR, though, gives new hope to finding proof of such things, although the project is mostly focused on mapping how matter distributed itself during the Universe's inflation with a mission of finding dark energy, that mysterious thing that sped up the Universe's expansion and then later overcame gravity to slow that growth down.
"POLARBEAR is a real tour de force," says Brian Keating, one of the scientists with POLARBEAR. "We have paved the way towards solving the deepest mysteries in the quest to understand matter and energy at the beginning of time."
