First hints of gravitational waves in the Big Bang’s afterglow

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Graduate student Justus Brevik testing the BICEP2 used to find evidence of cosmic inflation nearly 14 billion years ago. EPA/Steffen Richter/Harvard University Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in the US have announced overnight what they believe is the indirect detection of gravitational waves in the afterglow of the Big Bang. The discovery by the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation (BICEP) collaboration, indeed even the rumours of such a discovery, sparked a huge discussion among the scientific community. Why? As the last untested prediction of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, finding gravitational waves is a big deal. The BICEP discovery provides further indirect evidence for the existence of gravitational waves (the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor for finding a double pulsar that strongly supported these “ripples” in spacetime). Secondly, and most importantly, it advances our knowledge of the universe enormously. Before this announcement, thanks to Big Bang nucleosynthesis(when light elements such as hydrogen and helium were created), we could measure the universe back to about a minute after the Big Bang. The finding today has allowed us to study the universe when it was a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, when so-called “inflation” took place. Inflation was

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