کائنات کی توجیہ

London: An international team of astrophysicists has discovered the signal left in the sky by the super-rapid expansion of space that would have occurred fractions of a second after everything came into being following the Big Bang. Announcing their finding over a global press call, scientists from Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics said researchers from the BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) collaboration have found this first direct evidence for this cosmic inflation, a theory pioneered by Prof Alan Guth among others. Almost 14 billion years ago the universe burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang, they said. It has been theorized that in the first fleeting fraction of a second the universe expanded exponentially in what is described as the first tremors of the Big Bang, stretching far beyond the view of our best telescopes. Their data also represents the first images of gravitational waves or ripples in space-time. The team analysed their data for more than three years in an effort to rule out any errors.They also considered whether dust in our galaxy could produce the observed pattern, but the data suggest this is highly unlikely. Harvard theorist Avi Loeb said this work offers new insights into some of our most basic questions: Why do we exist ? How did the universe begin? These results not only offer strong evidence for inflation, they also tell us when inflation took place and how powerful the process was. These ground breaking results came from observations by the BICEP2 telescope of the cosmic microwave background, a faint glow left over from the Big Bang.