In what could potentially prove to be one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, researchers have claimed to have found evidence supporting the theory of Universal Inflation as it occurred a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Using the South Pole Telescope a consortium of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory scanned about 2% of the sky looking for patterns of light within the faint microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang.
After a three year search scientists have revealed that they’ve detected patterns in the microwave radiation that are consistent with the behavior of gravitational waves that would have been produced by the rapid expansion of the Universe to one thousand quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion times larger than it was during the instant of the Big Bang.
While the team’s research is still awaiting peer review many scientists are cautiously optimistic that the new findings are correct and that we now have a view into the awesome beginning of time and the Universe itself.