According to a news release from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, astronomers have detected a long-sought pattern of ancient light. The path of light from the early universe to our telescopes is extremely long and not straight. In fact, the ancient light journeyed billions of years to arrive at modern telescopes, and during its journey, its path was made askew by the pull of matter, resulting in a twisted light pattern.

This twisted pattern of light, known as B-modes, has finally been discovered. The finding, which will help enhance maps of matter across our universe, was achieved utilizing the National Science Foundation’s South Pole Telescope, as well as the Herschel space observatory.

Astronomers have long anticipated that two kinds of B-modes exist: the ones that were recently discovered were produced a few billion years into our universe’s existence. The others, known as primordial B-modes, are believed to have been generated when the universe was very young, a short time after its birth in the Big Bang.

“This latest discovery is a good checkpoint on our way to the measurement of primordial B-modes,” noted lead author Duncan Hanson of McGill University.

The mysterious primordial B-modes may be stamped with information about how our universe was birthed. Astronomers are currently examining data from the Planck mission in a quest to find primordial B-modes.

The most ancient light we observe around us today, known as the cosmic microwave background, stretches back to a time just hundreds of thousands of years after the universe was made. Planck recently generated a full-sky map of this light, showing new information about our universe’s age, contents and origins. A small portion of this ancient light is polarized, a process that precipitates the vibration of light waves in the same plane. The same rare occurrence takes place when sunlight reflects off lakes, or particles in our atmosphere.

The B-modes are a crooked pattern of polarized light. For this study, astronomers were looking for the type of polarized light generated by matter in a process known as gravitational lensing, where the gravitational pull from knots of matter deforms the path of light.

The signal are very faint, so the astronomers utilized Herschel’s infrared map of matter to help them know where to search. The astronomers then observed the signals with the South Pole Telescope, accomplishing the first-ever detection of B-modes. This is useful for improved mapping of how matter is dispersed throughout our universe. Groups of matter in the young universe are the sources of galaxies like our Milky Way.

Now, astronomers are on the hunt for primordial B-modes.

“These beautiful measurements from the South Pole Telescope and Herschel strengthen our confidence in our current model of the universe,” posited Olivier Doré, a member of the U.S. Planck science team at the JPL. “However, this model does not tell us how big the primordial signal itself should be. We are thus really exploring with excitement a new territory here, and a potentially very, very old one.”

The study’s results are described in greater detail in Physical Review Letters.