From USA Today:
In an achievement hailed as astounding, scientists have detected ripples made in the fabric of the universe just after the Big Bang, providing definitive evidence that that the universe underwent a fast and incomprehensibly massive growth spurt in its earliest infancy.
If the new findings are confirmed, they could very well earn the Nobel Prize for the scientists behind the research, says astrophysicist Xavier Siemens of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
“This is an amazing discovery,” he said. To find such strong evidence of these waves “is really just astounding.”
If the data are correct, “it’s a really profound discovery for cosmology,” says Cornell University cosmologist Rachel Bean. “It’s a phenomenal announcement.”
In the thinnest sliver of a second just after the Big Bang, the universe was smaller than the end of your pinky finger. To explain its current state, scientists have posited an event called “inflation,” when space expanded violently and almost instantaneously, growing roughly by 100 trillion trillion times, said cosmologist Daniel Baumann of the University of Cambridge.. . That should have magnified tiny ripples in the universe called primordial gravitational waves, which in turn left a stamp on light created some 13.5 billion years ago.
That light still pervades the cosmos today as a faint glow invisible to the naked eye called the cosmic microwave background. A team of U.S. scientists announced Monday that they’d used a telescope in Antarctica to detect a telltale “curl” in the microwaves’ orientation – a pattern that’s the fingerprint of gravitational waves. Overturning expectations, the researchers said the evidence for the patterned microwaves was much less subtle than had been predicted.
Einstein predicted the existence of such ripples a century ago, but thought they might be too faint to be detected.
Does this help prove God’s design in creation of the universe?