A team of researchers working at the South Pole announced Monday that BICEP2 cosmic microwave background telescope had detected ripples from gravitational waves – the first evidence of cosmic inflation.
This is one of the biggest discoveries in physics and cosmology in decades, providing direct information on the state of the universe when it was only 10-34 seconds old, energy scales near the Planck energy, as well confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves. The idea that the universe exponentially grew in a fraction of a second, rather merely rapidly expanding. The researchers at the South Pole were able to detect gravitational waves (ripples that squeeze space as they travel) and what they deemed the first direct evidence of this inflation occurring billions of years ago.
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