Explainer: what a flexed BICEP tells us about the big bang

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BICEP2 has spotted something pretty special from its South Pole base. Steffen Richter (Harvard University) The cosmological community is bubbling with the news that theBICEP2 experiment may have detected gravitational waves through measuring the radiation left over from the big bang. If the findings are correct, we will have the most convincing evidence to date that very early on, the universe experienced a phase of extremely rapid expansion known as “inflation”, during which a very small region was stretched to an enormous size, becoming bigger than our observable universe. We’ll also have a direct window into understanding particle physics at incredibly high energies and, in particular, the period of “grand unification”. This is far beyond what is possible to probe in particle experiments like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The big bang model says our universe is expanding and, as it does, it is slowly cooling down. Turning back the clock, this means that when the universe was much younger, it was also much hotter. The cosmic microwave background, which BICEP2 was probing, is radiation left over from this hotter epoch and provides the best evidence we have that the big bang actually happened. But while the big bang model has been confirmed

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