Big Bang: Indian Physicist Abhas Mitra Feels Vindicated

Abhas Mitra, an Indian astrophysicist, who rejected the findings by a team of US-led astronomers that there were immediate gravitational waves following the heated explosion of the Big Bang, now feels vindicated after receiving support from Paul Steinhardt, a top theoretical physicist at Princeton University in the US. Mitra works with Mumbai's Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC).

The astronomers working with BICEP-2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) radio telescope at the South Pole put forth to the world at the news conference in March that immediately after the Big Bang, there was ‘cosmic inflation’ at the intensity level of 10 raised to the power of 78.

Mitra was alone in his rejection of the finding for which the world was predicting a Nobel prize. The astrophysicist filed a mathematical proof in a peer review paper in which he stated that the universe can expand only with a uniform speed and model that does not allow for cyclic cosmologies. The BICEP-2 findings were incorrect as he published his proof in the ‘New Astronomy’ international journal.

Last week Paul Steinhardt, respected theoretical physicist at Princeton, published a paper in the ‘Nature’ journal. The serious shortcomings that Steinhardt highlighted in the analysis are due to flaws in the data from the BICEP-2 analysis and its claim of having found gravitational waves.

The first flaw is in the BICEP2 team’s identification of a twisty (B-mode) pattern in its maps of polarization of the cosmic microwave background. The team’s conclusion from their telescope at the South Pole stated that this was a detection of primordial gravitational waves.

Steinhardt followed Mitra and pointed out that there are other twists produced within our Galaxy. This is due to light scattering from dust and the synchrotron radiation generated by electrons moving around galactic magnetic fields that have been found in our Galaxy.

It is not the first time that Mitra has challenged theories of mainstream cosmologists and succeeded. Earlier, a research conducted by him had claimed that the so-called Black Holes proposed by the famed British physicist Stephen Hawking must be ‘grey holes’ and not Black Holes.
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