Scientists will announce a "major discovery" on Monday, March 17, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, according to a news release from the institution.
The big news will be delivered at a press conference, streamed live starting at 11:55 a.m. EDT at this link. Business Insider will also be covering the announcement.
Rumors surrounding the topic of the discovery are starting to fly, but nothing has been confirmed and the media alert offered no hints.
The Guardian reports on speculation that the discovery has to do with finding of evidence of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were produced in the early universe. The imprint they left when the universe was born 13.82 billion years ago would give us an idea of what the universe was like when it just came into existence.
According to The Guardian: "The signal is rumored to have been found by a specialized telescope called Bicep (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) at the south pole."
Gravitational waves were the last untested prediction of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
"It's been called the Holy Grail of cosmology," Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist from University College London, told The Guardian. "It would be a real major, major, major discovery."
There are still reasons not to get ahead of ourselves.
Even if they do announce they've discovered these signatures of the early universe, that data will need to be scrutinized by other scientists and confirmed by other experiments.
Phil Plait, who writes Slate's Bad Astronomy blog, said in a Facebook post that he will not speculate on the discovery. "If the rumors are false," he wrote, "then I've wasted my time, and that of others, and weakened the overall public appreciation of astronomy."
It's still fun to guess.
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