Planck interstellar dust map clouds gravitational wave results

Nature : The team operating the European Space Agency’s Planck orbiter has released a preprint of the spacecraft’s much-anticipated full-sky survey of interstellar dust. The new map shows that the polarization of dust in the section of sky observed by the BICEP2 experiment is much higher than was anticipated. In March 2014, the BICEP2 experiment detected in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) what appeared to be signs of gravitational waves in the early universe. However, the results were questioned by many researchers who doubted that the signal from interstellar dust had been properly accounted for. The data from Planck confirm that the BICEP2 signal has a significant contribution from interstellar dust, but whether any of the signal arose from primordial gravitational waves remains unclear. Further analysis of the Planck data is under way.