Landmark Discovery: New Results Provide Direct Evidence for Cosmic Inflation

(Before It's News)

The BICEP telescope located at the south pole. Image Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Astronomers have announced Nobel Prize-worthy evidence of primordial gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime — providing the first direct evidence the universe underwent a brief but stupendously accelerated expansion immediately following the big bang.

“We’ve found the smoking gun evidence for inflation and we’ve also produced the first image of gravitational waves across the sky,” said Chao-Lin Kuo from Stanford University, designer of BICEP2 detector, which produced the new results.

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© Shannon Hall for Universe Today, 2014. |
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Post tags: Astronomy, Big Bang, Cosmology, inflation

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