The first direct evidence of the Big Bang and cosmic inflation has been discovered

Astrophysicists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center have observedgravitational waves — the first ever direct evidence of the Big Bang, the theory that the entire universe sprung into existence from a tiny spot in the universe 13.8 billion years ago. The significance of this discovery is comparable in importance to CERN’s confirmation of the Higgs boson in 2012, and there is already talk of a Nobel prize for Harvard’s new findings.

Gravitational waves were originally predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1916, but until now had never been observed. In the same vein, the Higgs boson was originally proposed back in the ’60s, but wasn’t detected until recently. In my opinion, this is one of the most magnificent products of the scientific method; it is mind blowing that, with a bit of math, we can predict the existence of an unobservable and unknowable particle or force with remarkable accuracy 98 years before it’s actually discovered.

Anyway, I digress. Gravitational waves, as the name suggests, are ripples in spacetime that propagate outward from a source — in this case, the Big Bang. Without getting too deep into the physics of it, gravitational waves (appear to) have existed since the very trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second when the universe expanded from being an infinitesimally small speck, to around the size of a marble. The universe has expanded for the nearly 14 billion years since, and those gravitational waves have kept on propagating. The theory predicts that, if we can detect some gravitational waves, it’s proof of the initial expansion during the Big Bang, and then the continued inflation ever since.

Enter the BICEP2, a radio telescope situated at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station (pictured top and below). Between 2010 and 2012, it listened into the cosmic microwave background (CMB), looking for hints B-mode polarization — a twist in the CMB that could only have been caused by the ripples of gravitational waves. Now, following a lot of data analysis, the leaders are announcing that they’ve found that B-mode polarization — and it looks like the image above. The work will now be scrutinized by the rest of the scientific community, of course, but the general consensus seems confident that it will stand up.

In terms of scientific significance, the confirmation of gravitational waves would be the first direct evidence of the Big Bang theory — that the universe started out as nothing, erupted into existence 13.8 billion years ago, and has continued to expand ever since. This would be confirmation that cosmic inflation really exists, and that the entire structure of the universe — everything that we see, everyone that we know, and everything that will ever happen — was decided by the tiniest flux of gravitational waves during the first undecillionth second of the universe.