“Astronomers Just Detected the Beginning of the Big Bang”, “Big Bang’s Smoking Gun Found”, “Astronomers Discover First Direct Proof of the Big Bang Expansion” and “Major Discovery: ‘Smoking Gun’ for Universe’s Incredible Big Bang Expansion Found” were some of the headlines on Monday 17 March 2014 around the web-based news media.
One article described it as follows:
Radio astronomers operating telescopes at the South Pole said Monday that they’ve discovered evidence that the universe ballooned out of the Big Bang due to a massive gravitational force generated by space itself. The discovery is being called the “smoking gun” for the Big Bang theory, and it could have huge implications for our understanding of our universes [sic] (and possible others).
Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist John M. Kovac and his team detected gravitational waves—tiny ripples in the fabric of space—that could be the first real evidence for the ‘inflation’ hypothesis of how the universe basically bubbled into being nearly 14 billion years ago. The discovery also suggests that our 14 billion light-years of space aren’t all that’s out there—our universe could be a tiny corner of something much, much bigger.
