Big Bang discovery opens doors to multiverse

It is being described as the ‘Holy Grail’ of cosmology. This week, a team of scientists identified evidence of cosmic inflation right after the Big Bang, a finding which helps explain how the entire Universe originated.

Scientists in the United States believe they have identified an echo of so-called gravitational waves – signals left in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, when the Universe came into existence some 14 billion years ago.

Researchers at Harvard University believe they have found a "signal in the sky" that emerged during the first moments of ultra-rapid expansion just after the universe came into existence. The scientists think they have observed gravitational waves, first postulated in 1916 by Albert Einstein as part of his General Theory of Relativity. Gravitation waves are essentially ripples in space-time that have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang."

A team of scientists have been peering into space with a telescope set up at the South Pole where the dry, thin air creates "ideal observing conditions". The telescope, known as Bicep2 – Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 – allowed scientists to analyse the polarisation of light left over from our universe's early moments.

“This detection is cosmology’s missing link, it’s something we thought should be there, but we weren’t really sure and it’s been eagerly sought now for close to two decades,” said theoretical physicist theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski.

But, until now, none of the numerous elaborate experiments designed to measure them had borne fruit.

The implications are profound. According to scientists, the existence of gravitational waves provides conclusive evidence for the much-debated theory of cosmic inflation – a sudden and colossal expansion of the universe thought to have occurred in the first minuscule fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

“The observable universe grew from the size of an atom to the size of a basketball in an enormously small fraction of a second. The theory of cosmic inflation, something that had been hypothesized for 30 years, and now here is a direct prediction made by that theory that has been confirmed,” explained astrophysicist Mordecai-Mark Mac Low.

The race is now on to try to replicate the findings.

If confirmed, they are likely to win the team who discovered them a Nobel Prize for physics.