Scientists say they have
extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Seed Theory for the origin of the
Universe.
Researchers believe they have found the signal left in the sky by the
super-rapid expansion of space that must have occurred just fractions of a
second after everything came into being.
It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with
telescopes.
The aim has been to try to find a residual marker for "inflation" - the idea
that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth,
of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.
Theory holds that this would have taken the infant Universe from something
unimaginably small to something about the size of a marble. Space has continued
to expand for the nearly 14 billion years since.
Speaking at the press conference to announce the results, Prof John Kovac of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and a leader of the BICEP2
collaboration, said: "This is opening a window on what we believe to be a new
regime of physics - the physics of what happened in the first unbelievably tiny
fraction of a second in the Universe."
British scientist Dr Jo Dunkley, who has been searching through data from the European Planck
space telescope for a B-mode signal, commented: "I can't tell you how
exciting this is. Inflation sounds like a crazy idea, but everything that is
important, everything we see today - the galaxies, the stars, the planets - was
imprinted at that moment, in less than a trillionth of a second. If this is
confirmed, it's huge."
