Big Bang's Smoking Gun Found

Big Bang's Smoking Gun Found

MAR 17, 2014 11:10 AM ET // BY IRENE KLOTZ


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The detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe created from nine years of WMAP data. This map represents the tiny temperature fluctuations (anisotropies) measured in the ancient cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe.

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For the first time, scientists have found direct evidence of the expansion of the universe, a previously theoretical event that took place a fraction of a second after the Big Bang explosion nearly 14 billion years ago.

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We all know that the universe is big. Really big. But just how large is it?

The clue is encoded in the primordial cosmic microwave background radiation that continues to spread through space to this day.

Scientists found and measured a key polarization, or orientation, of the microwaves caused by gravitational waves, which are miniature ripples in the fabric of space.

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Gravitational waves, proposed by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity nearly 100 years ago but never before proven, are believed to have originated in the Big Bang explosion and then been amplified by the universe’s inflation.

“Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today,” lead researcher John Kovac, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement.

Because gravitational waves squeeze space as they travel, they imprint a specific pattern in the cosmic microwave background. Like light waves, gravitational waves have “handedness” that correlates to left- and right-skewed polarizations.

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Using a special telescope located at the South Pole, scientists not only detected gravitational waves in the universe’s fossil radiation; they also found that the telltale polarization signals are much stronger than expected.

“This has been like looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead we found a crowbar,” team co-leader Clem Pryke, with the University of Minnesota, said in a press release.

In addition to providing the first direct evidence of the universe’s inflation, the measurements can be used to date the process and determine how much energy it took.

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Computer models indicate that the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times in .0000000000000000000000000000000001 (10 to the minus-34) seconds after the Big Bang explosion 13.8 billion years ago.

The telescope used to detect the gravitational waves is called Bicep, short for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization.



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