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181-W5-2 -Science- Courtesy of The Telegraph

Proof of the Big Bang

A stunning discovery made at a research station in Antarctica indicates that Albert Einstein was right about the nature of the universe

By Michael Hanlon 8:20PM GMT 17 Mar 2014

The most epoch-making discoveries can be made in the unlikeliest of places. The smoking out of the elusive Higgs boson, perhaps the greatest recent milestone in fundamental physics, took place in 2012 under the serene and agreeable pastures of the Franco-Swiss border, home to Cern’s muscular atom-smasher, the £8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

Now another team of scientists, this time American and operating a £12 million telescope in the considerably less clement surroundings of the South Pole, has announced the discovery of what may figuratively be described as the fingerprint of God.

The 10-metre South Pole Telescope at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station (Reuters)

The importance of this finding, announced yesterday afternoon at an excited press conference at Harvard University, cannot be overestimated; one leading physicist has gone so far as to describe it as “one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time”. The phrase “Holy Grail” is being bandied about, and there is talk of the most certain shoo-in for a Nobel Prize for decades. The researchers, headed by Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, appear to have found the very echoes of creation.

The announcement confirmed that the Bicep2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation) telescope at the Amundsen-Scott polar base in Antarctica had found conclusive evidence for the existence of gravity waves, colossal ripples in space-time that pervade today’s universe and which were formed when the cosmos was just 10 to the minus 35 seconds old – a length of time shorter than it would take the Starship Enterprise to cross from one side of a grain of sand to another.

If this is confirmed, it will be the final experimental vindication of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It will show once and for all that the notion that our universe began with a colossal explosion of matter and energy 13,978,000,000 years ago – the Big Bang – is correct.

But the implications are more profound even than that. The existence of gravity waves is the “smoking gun” for the controversial theory of cosmic inflation, the idea that right at the start of the universe, nearly 14 billion years ago, everything underwent a colossally fast period of expansion – the “B of the Bang”, if you like.

An image showing the tiny temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (Harvard University)

If cosmic inflation, which we need in order to explain several weird facts about our universe, is correct, then this provides strong support for the notion of the “multiverse”; the idea that what we see when we look up at the night sky is but a gnat on the back of the elephant that is the true totality of creation.

The existence of gravity waves is strong evidence that “our” universe may not only exist alongside an infinite number of parallel worlds, but may itself be infinite in extent, containing endless copies of our galaxy – and indeed our world and you and me – located countless trillions of light years apart.

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Big Bang echo: scientists find 'signal from dawn of time'

Astronomers have detected the first evidence of gravitational ripples which were sent out in the first second of the Big Bang

Scientists have been studying cosmic microwave background, shown in this map, looking for early echoes of the universe Photo: ESA / LFI & HFI Consortia

By Sarah Knapton, Science Correspondent

5:39PM GMT 17 Mar 2014

Our universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago. Fractions of a second later, space and time were created, expanding exponentially in an episode known as 'inflation'.

It was theorized that inflation should also produce gravitational waves - ripples in space-time which spread throughout the universe.

"Think of the ripples you see when you throw a stone into a pond," said Professor Martin Hendry of the department of Physics and Astronomy at the Univesity of Glasgow.

"But these aren't ripples on the surface of the water, they are gravitational waves emitted billions of years ago, rippling through the fabric of space and time itself, in the universe's earliest moments.

"We always suspected they were still washing about but we haven't been able to detect them.

"Think of a cocktail party where a great many voices are speaking all at once. It's hard to distinguish any individual voice but suddenly you hear someone with a high pitched voice, or someone a bit more excitable. That's what we have been looking for."

The signal was found using a specialised telescope called Bicep (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) at the South Pole.

It scans the sky at microwave frequencies, where it picks up light energy from slightly after the Big Bang - around 380,000 years later. Scientists have been searching for tiny ripples in this light which would show it is being slightly stretched by gravitational waves.

The effect of gravitational waves causes a distinct twisting pattern known as a 'curl' or 'b-mode' in the cosmic microwave background radiation.

"The swirly B-mode pattern of polarization is a unique signature of gravitational waves," say Chao-Lin Kuo of Stanford University.

"This is the first direct image of gravitational waves across the primordial sky."

Gravitational waves cause the cosmic radiation (light emitted shortly after the Big Bang) - to swirl

The team travelled to the South Pole scan the sky because it is the clearest place on Earth for stargazing.