Today, February 11, 2020, LIGO scientists announced they had detected gravitational waves in September 2015—the first direct evidence of the cosmic inflation that created our universe. "The Tantalizing Quest For Gravity Waves," written by Arthur Fisher and originally published in the April 1981 issue of Popular Science, explores the international effort to detect these ripples in space-time.
It was a huge win for Big Bang supporters when, in March 2014, a team of astronomers claimed they had found direct evidence to support the concept of cosmic inflation—the super-rapid expansion of the Universe that occurred just fractions of a second after it exploded into existence. The discovery was monumental, completely altering our perception of the early moments of space and time. “This is huge, as big as it gets,” Marc Kamionkowski, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not part of the team, told the New York Times.
Scientists announced today (March 17) that they hadfound the first direct evidence of the dramatic expansion that created the known universe, known as cosmic inflation, or the "bang" in the Big Bang. This dramatic expansion is thought to have occurred in the first instants of existence, nearly 14 billion years ago, causing the universe to expand beyond the reach of the most powerful telescopes.
