Researchers say they’ve found evidence of what happened at the very first moment of the Big Bang.
They say the universe grew so quickly, it left ripples in patterns of light, visible in the very far reaches of the universe.
As reported by The New York Times:
Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say.
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If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.
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Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, an early-universe expert who was not part of the team, said, “This is huge, as big as it gets.” He continued, “This is a signal from the very earliest universe, sending a telegram encoded in gravitational waves.”
You can watch a clip from the Associated Press on the discovery.
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