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A team of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian institute working on a project known as Bicep
2 have say they've discovered the smoking gun which proves the universe expanded phenomenally
quickly in the moments after its creation.
Since the 1980s, the so-called inflation theory has been mooted to answer several questions
about the big ***, such as why the universe as we see it looks more or less the same on
all sides, rather than significantly more chaotic. Inflation answered these questions.
It proposed that a tiny fraction of a second after the universe began, it expanded from
almost nothing to the size of a marble.
This might not sound like much, but going from nothing to that size represents a growth
of 100 trillion trillion times its own size in ten to the power - 34 second, or 0.33 zeros
then a one. It was a pretty big deal. Such a catastrophic event, it's believed, created
ripples known as gravitational waves, which smoothed out the universe, and allowed it
to continue expanding in a more-or-less similar fashion for all the billions of years since,
creating everything we see, and everything we are, today. An interesting idea, but until
now these waves had never been identified.
Bicep 2 is an experiment based at the Bicep telescope at the south pole. It uses an array
of incredible sensitive detectors, operating at almost absolute zero, to scan a small patch
of Cosmic microwave background, the leftovers of the moment the universe had expanded enough
to let light free, some 300,000 years after the big ***. There were hints of gravitational
waves in the CMB, but they were too weak to be analysed. With bicep 2, however, they came
out remarkably strongly - so strong in fact that the team originally thought they must
be mistaken.
And this is what it looks like. This is what means we can exist. And it was a powerful
force, the strength of the signal puts it at 10,000 trillion gigaelectronvolts. That's
a lot, and very significant because it supports the so-called Grand Unified Theory, an idea
that at one time the forces that hold the universe together, strong, weak and electromagnetic
interactions were one single force which eventually separated from gravity.
There's already talk that the work could be set for a Nobel prize, but for such an important
discovery there's likely to be a lot of peer review and analysis before that happens.