Astronomers with reasonable certainty have measured the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years and posited its creation when a pinpoint in a vast void suddenly and violently exploded in an event we have come to know as the Big Bang.
But then what?
After nearly four years of building a telescope at the South Pole, where the frigid dry atmosphere offers few distortions, and three years of painstaking analysis of data from BICEP2 (an acronym for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization), a team of top astronomers led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics believe they have found the answer.
What happened next goes by the pedestrian name "Cosmic Inflation." In the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, gravitational waves blew outward, through a "soup" of random particles, at speeds sometimes exceeding the speed of light. One scientist called the theory of Inflation "the most important idea in cosmology since the Big Bang itself."
After 380,000 years, according to the astronomers, the soup, roiled by the gravitational waves, cooled enough to form atoms, which coalesced into stars, then galaxies and finally planets. Since then, the universe has continued to expand outward in the form as we now know it - or think we know it.
The evidence the astronomers sought, and other teams of scientists are trying to confirm, is described as ripples in the fabric of space-time that show up as specific patterns of light waves within the glow left over from the Big Bang. Kovac called it "the smoking-gun signature of inflation."
Inflation was first hypothesized in 1980, but the BICEP2 elevates that to a testable theory and opens up a vast new field of astrophysics. The discovery also adds additional proof to a much older theory, Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity first propounded in 1916.
Einstein would have been immensely pleased, although perhaps not surprised, by this discovery, which like his own theory answered one big question but raised a thousand new ones.
- Evansville Courier