Reminder: Planck Satellite Data Coming on December 22nd!

Just a quick reminder to primordial wave enthusiasts: the Planck satellite team will make the instrument's data publicly available on December 22nd 2014!

If you don't know, way back in March of this year, the BICEP2 team, situated in Antarctica, made an experimental discovery that seemed to confirm the theory of inflation. In other words, we had ostensibly understood the evolution of the universe up to a fraction of a second after it came into existence (I'm talking a really small fraction; something close to 10 to the minus 30 seconds!).

Everything seemed great, especially since the experimental results yielded a very strong r value of 0.2. However, the Planck satellite, which was simultaneously conducting similar experiments and attempting to tackle the exact same question as BICEP2 initially put forth contradicting results, with an r value of just 0.11.

Of course, at that time, only half of the Planck satellite's data was in, so it was difficult to compare both teams. In just a few days now, the full set of data, along with the analysis, will be made public and it's going to be very interesting to see if the results corroborate or contradict BICEP 2. If it's he former, party time! If the latter however…it should make for some very interesting debates.

At the very least, we'll be able to conduct some good physics either way!

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