#Harvard-led team detects gravitational waves, evidence of cosmic inflation - Science - Boston.com
▻http://www.boston.com/news/science/blogs/science-in-mind/2014/03/17/harvard-led-team-detects-gravitational-waves-evidence-cosmic-inflation/319PYbiMlTc6r2MN3ID6XP/blog.html
A team led by a Harvard astronomer announced Monday that it had detected a pattern in the distant cosmos that reveals what happened in the first known moments after the Big Bang 13 billion years ago: a hyper-expansion of our universe known as inflation.
The scientists have also for the first time directly detected gravitational waves, which have been long predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity but never directly observed.
“Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today,” John Kovac, associate professor of astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who led the team, said in a statement.