Astronomers have found evidence of gravitational waves that started from the Big Bang during a period of great expansion called inflation. The evidence was presented on March 17 by lead researcher John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, according to Nature.
The discovery was made with the help of a telescope at the South Pole called Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (BICEP2), CNN reported. The astronomers were able to study the polarization of light left over from the early universe.
"It teaches us something crucial about how our universe began," said Sean Carroll, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. "It's an amazing achievement that we humans, doing science systematically for just a few hundred years, can extend our understanding that far."
Cosmologist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. said the discovery would rule out theories involving the properties of energy that lead to inflation, Nature reported. "The family of acceptable models has been collapsed tremendously," Kamionkowski said.
The researchers used BICEP2 to look at the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, which is the direction the electric field is pointing across the sky, CNN reported. James Bock, co-leader of the BICEP2 team and professor of physics at California Institute of Technology, said the researchers were looking for "B-Modes", a type of polarization that show a curling pattern in the polarized orientation of light from the ancient universe. In theory, this polarization pattern could only be made from gravitational waves.
David Spergel, professor of astrophysics at Princeton University, said the findings have to be reviewed with skepticism because of how important they are, and that the difficulty of making the measurements can lead to it being tampered with. Spergel added that there are some concerning elements in the results, according to CNN.
"I am looking forward to seeing these results confirmed or refuted by other experiments in the next year or two," Spergel said.
