An artists drawing of a proposed space mission to detect and measure gravitational waves. (Credit: NASA via Wikimedia Commons).
On March 17, researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics announced that they had found evidence of gravitational waves in cosmic background radiation. These ripples in the fabric of space-time provide strong evidence for the theory of inflation, which says that the infant universe underwent a sudden and rapid expansion – increasing in size by about 100 trillion trillion times – in a tiny fraction of a second, just after the Big Bang. Inflation is one of the leading theories to explain why the light from the early observable universe looks roughly the same in all directions. Many speculate that this discovery will lead to a Nobel Prize.
