Evidence has been found showing that our universe expanded rapidly, like you when your mum gets home and you realise you haven’t taken the clothes out of the washing machine rapidly, in the first few nanoseconds of its existence.
The data showing gravitational waves will help to answer the eternal questions ‘what happened at the beginning of everything?,’ which will be cute.
A visual aid:
“These results are a smoking gun for inflation [inflationary Big Bang theory], because alternative theories do not predict such a signal,” said Stanford physicist Andrei Linde, and called the findings something he has “been hoping to see for 30 years.”
In a blog post before the big announce, Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll said: “Punchline: other than finding life on other planets or directly detecting dark matter, I can’t think of any other plausible near-term astrophysical discovery more important than this one for improving our understanding of the universe. It would be the biggest thing since dark energy. (And I might owe Max Tegmark $100 — at least, if Planck confirms the result. I will joyfully pay up.) Note that the big news here isn’t that gravitational waves exist — of course they do. The big news is that we have experimental evidence of something that was happening right when our universe was being born.”
Punchline: Scientists are riding the gravitational waves.
via CNN
Title image via MIND BLOWN
