metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
A new find dealing with the Big Bang was just released, and at least some cosmologists are calling it "smoking gun" evidence. Here's a few paragraphs with the link:
Astronomers have found the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation, the theorized dramatic expansion of the universe that put the "bang" in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, new research suggests.
If it holds up, the landmark discovery which also confirms the existence of hypothesized ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves would give researchers a much better understanding of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath.
"If it is confirmed, then it would be the most important discovery since the discovery, I think, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who is not a member of the study team, told Space.com, comparing the finding to a 1998 observation that opened the window on mysterious dark energy and won three researchers the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics...
Beginning just 10 to the minus 35 seconds (roughly one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) after the universe's birth, the idea goes, space-time expanded incredibly rapidly, ballooning outward faster than the speed of light. (This did not violate Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, which holds that nothing can move faster than light through space, since inflation was an expansion of space itself.)...
"Why the cosmic microwave background temperature is the same at different spots in the sky would be a mystery if it was not for inflation saying, well, our whole sky came from this tiny region," Chuck Bennett, principal investigator of NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission, told Space.com last year. "So the idea of inflation helps answer some of these mysteries, and it explains where these fluctuations came from."
But astronomers had never claimed to find a smoking gun for inflation until now.
The smoking gun is a type of polarization in the CMB known as "B-modes." The spectacular expansion of the universe during inflation produced gravitational waves, which, in turn, generated the B-modes, according to the theory...
Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, as part of his theory of general relativity. The new find represents the first direct evidence of these primordial space-time ripples, researchers said...
In addition to providing strong support for inflation theory, the new BICEP2 observations reveal some details about the inflation process itself.
For example, the strength of the B-mode signal suggests that inflation occurred at tremendous energy levels levels so high that all of the major forces in the universe, except gravity, were unified at the time, Loeb said...
-- http://news.yahoo.com/major-discovery-smoking-gun-universes-incredible-big-bang-145912987.html
Thoughts?
Astronomers have found the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation, the theorized dramatic expansion of the universe that put the "bang" in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, new research suggests.
If it holds up, the landmark discovery which also confirms the existence of hypothesized ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves would give researchers a much better understanding of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath.
"If it is confirmed, then it would be the most important discovery since the discovery, I think, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who is not a member of the study team, told Space.com, comparing the finding to a 1998 observation that opened the window on mysterious dark energy and won three researchers the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics...
Beginning just 10 to the minus 35 seconds (roughly one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) after the universe's birth, the idea goes, space-time expanded incredibly rapidly, ballooning outward faster than the speed of light. (This did not violate Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, which holds that nothing can move faster than light through space, since inflation was an expansion of space itself.)...
"Why the cosmic microwave background temperature is the same at different spots in the sky would be a mystery if it was not for inflation saying, well, our whole sky came from this tiny region," Chuck Bennett, principal investigator of NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission, told Space.com last year. "So the idea of inflation helps answer some of these mysteries, and it explains where these fluctuations came from."
But astronomers had never claimed to find a smoking gun for inflation until now.
The smoking gun is a type of polarization in the CMB known as "B-modes." The spectacular expansion of the universe during inflation produced gravitational waves, which, in turn, generated the B-modes, according to the theory...
Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, as part of his theory of general relativity. The new find represents the first direct evidence of these primordial space-time ripples, researchers said...
In addition to providing strong support for inflation theory, the new BICEP2 observations reveal some details about the inflation process itself.
For example, the strength of the B-mode signal suggests that inflation occurred at tremendous energy levels levels so high that all of the major forces in the universe, except gravity, were unified at the time, Loeb said...
-- http://news.yahoo.com/major-discovery-smoking-gun-universes-incredible-big-bang-145912987.html
Thoughts?
Let them become irrelevant. I'm absolutely enjoying digging into the discovery.
