Posted on 03/17/2014 8:46:48 AM PDT by Seizethecarp
On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.
Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.
Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved.
If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.
Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, an early-universe expert who was not part of the team, said, “This is huge, as big as it gets.”
Dr. Kovac and his collaborators, working in an experiment known as Bicep, for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, reported their results in a scientific briefing at the Center for Astrophysics here on Monday and in a set of papers submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.
Dr. Kovac said the chance that the results were a fluke was only one in 3.5 million — a gold standard of discovery called five-sigma.
Guth pronounced himself “bowled over,” saying he had not expected such a definite confirmation in his lifetime.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Exactly, I wonder the same. Our earth “space time” is not the same as elsewhere, shouldn’t we have some sort of “universe space time index” and measure earth space-time against that? some type of ratio?
I’ve never heard of any such thing though(?)
Very interesting. This would be really big news. Thanks so much for tracking it down.
I measure everything based on Betelgeuse Mean Time.
Bookmark for later.
So what exactly went bang?and where did it come from in the first place?
Who pulled the trigger on the Big Bang?
Reading it now. Thanks mucho!
Write up a Lorentz transformation for it, for us.
I will never understand Christians objecting to the Big Bang Theory. It is merely Genesis 1:1 expressed in different language.
Except it makes no claim to know why the BB happened.
Or
Universe was created by some sort of God or in by the Big Bang.
Those who believe don't see any problem for an infinite God to create a billion year old rock in a few nanoseconds.
They are a-poppin’ for joy.
Nerds celebrating.
It’s kind of cute.
But seriously, this is cool stuff.
5,000 comments just on CNN story now.
I live just down the road from Hanford LIGO; hope they get some positive results as well.
Well, there ya have it. Not really all that different is it?
All 3 of my babies wrenched me apart before they were a second old.
Been reading on it for the last couple of hours.
Guardian.com version of story from Friday has some interesting comments.
Be sure to expand comments on the Guardian or you’ll miss the good ones.
May The Great Green Arklesiezure sneeze upon you.
In other words, "photons" technically covers more spectrum than the (human) visible spectrum of electromagnetic energy. Radio telescopes capture photons, just as optical telescopes do.
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