Big Bang's Smoking Gun Found

astroengine writes "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. 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. 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."

Comments

Gravity waves from the first inch of expansion

[jfdavis668]

Pretty damn cool.

Astrology is amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

My hat's off too all the hard-working, dedicated cosmetologists that made this possible.

Re:Astrology is amazing

[jfdavis668]

and give everything a nice, healthy glow

Next up: a direct detection

[SeanDS]

A direct detection of a gravitational wave moving the mirrors of a large scale interferometer is up next. In the next few years, Advanced LIGO (US), Advanced Virgo (Italy) and KAGRA (Japan) will come online with the hope of directly detecting gravitational waves from sources such as supernovae and coalescing binary star systems. With this kind of network, it will then be possible to coordinate both electromagnetic and gravitational searches of our sky. This is useful for many reasons, one of which is that it lets us listen to the sound of black holes colliding where no light escapes.

Exciting times!

Re:Next up: a direct detection

[lgw]

It's not contradictory. The black holes will dump a metric giga-fuckton of energy as gravity waves before merging (it's science, so we have to use these new-fangled metric units). Once they merge, well, the established theory is that no energy could escape but that's being challenged more often these days. AFAIK, no one every actually detected Hawking radiation and everything predicted about black hole decay is untested, so having any detector that can observe a black hole merger will tell us a bunch!

Summary wrong (sigh)

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have plenty of direct evidence for the expansion of the universe. See redshifting of galaxies etc.

This announcement is about inflation - a particular period of rapid expansion immediately after the big bang.

Indirect measurement of gravitational waves

[photonic]

Note that this the second indirect evidence for the existence of gravitational waves, the first one was the orbital decay of a binary system that included a pulsar, discovered by Hulse and Taylor (Nobel Prize 1993). Today's result, if confirmed, seems pretty spectacular, and might be rewarded with a second Nobel Prize. For a first direct detection of gravitational waves, we have to wait for first detections by LIGO, Virgo and eLISA.

Matt Strassler perspective

[mghiggins]

Some interesting perspective from Matt Strassler, who's a particle physicist at Harvard.

He points out that this is still an *indirect* observation of gravitational waves (and not the first one) and that the results look sensibly in line with some predictions from inflation. And that while this is a tremendous experiment, it's not any kind of "smoking gun", and we really need to wait for replication to get properly excited.

Re:gravity waves

[HonIsCool]

Gravitational waves are a prediction of general relativity and not related to gravitons (assuming that's what you meant) that are theorized to be the carrier of gravity in quantum gravity theories.