Hasta La Gadget!

Mar 17

Evidence of the Big Bang found in a cosmic ‘double rainbow’

It might not look like much, but this is the evidence of where we came from.

(Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

While you were thinking about where you’ll be spending St. Patrick’s Day on Monday night, the hard-working folks at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics were sharing the first direct evidence of a concept first put forward by Albert Einstein almost a century ago that helps explain where we — and everything else in the universe — come from.

If your list of to-dos and projects doesn’t suddenly seem a little less impressive by comparsion, then congratulations! You’re a narcissist.

If you want to cut right to it, scientists have spotted the remnants of the until-now-theorized massive, mind-melting exponential expansion of the universe that occurred in the one trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. This evidence comes in the form of gravitational waves that Einstein predicted back in 1916 as part of his theory of general relativity.

These waves, also often described as “ripples in space-time,” were detected using a specialized instrument located at the South Pole called BICEP 2 that basically stares into the vast nothingness of space and measures the polarization of the faint background radiation believed to be left over from the Big Bang.

“Our team hunted for a special type of polarization calle… [Read more]