TYE_The Time Traveler
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A new look at the Big Bang, moments later
CAMBRIDGE — In a landmark discovery about the first moments of the universe, a team led by a Harvard astronomer announced Monday it had found strong evidence of what happened just after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago:
In the slightest fraction of a second, the universe — a speck one-billionth the size of a proton — doubled in size 100 times over, a dramatic expansion called inflation. Scientists call it the “bang” of the Big Bang.
The discovery was accomplished by capturing the first images of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that were predicted a century ago by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Scientists hailed the finding as a transformative event that will provide deep and complicated questions for physicists to explore as well as transfix the imagination of the broader public, because it gives insight into a foundational question in physics: How did the universe begin?
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/sci...c-inflation/nvWTo5iSyhbMauKD1GegsK/story.html
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