Scientists have been whipping up a frenzy this week, following the announcement of a truly mind-boggling discovery last Monday. Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (USA) have captured the signature of gravity waves from the early Universe. Now, just like the Higgs Boson announcement from 2012, this one takes a bit of time to wrap your head around, but the consequences are out of this world.
The twisting pattern shown here represents the first direct image of gravity waves from cosmic inflation, in the moments just after the Big Bang.
Source: EPA/Harvard University
Firstly, this discovery provides the first evidence for gravity waves, a phenomenon that scientists have been searching for over many decades. Gravity waves are tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime and they were predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. This theory has now survived every test that could be thrown at it. Even the bizarre notion of time ticking at different rates, depending on gravity and speed, is put into practical use every time we use a GPS to find where we are.
Finding gravity waves could open up a whole new window on the world around us. We are used to looking at the world using light, which are electromagnetic waves. But gravity waves hold just as great a potential. They could be used to see inside a neutron star, to watch a star collapse within a supernova or to examine two black holes colliding. They could even reveal new physics ideas and make it possible to pick up the vibrations of cosmic strings or determine the number of dimensions of the Universe.
In this artist's impression, two black holes are entwined in a gravitational tango that will eventually collapse the pair into a single black hole.
Secondly, the discovery provides the best proof of cosmic inflation – the idea that within a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe went through a period of rapid expansion. Picture a child blowing bubbles, but in this case, the Universe grew from absolutely miniscule to larger than the observable Universe in the blink of an eye.
Only cosmic inflation predicts the rise of gravity waves in the early Universe. And now that the theory has passed this test, other predictions of inflation may well hold true; such as spacetime being infinite and that the multiverse concept is real. We are one step closer to the possibility that there exists an infinite number of Universes, separate to ours, that are continually erupting, just like ours did, out of some sort of ever inflating "sea".
How the detection was made: First hints of gravitational waves in the Big Bang's afterglow by Krzysztof Bolejko (University of Sydney) and Alan Duffy (University of Melbourne), in The Conversation