Daniel BuenoAlthough this finding must still be re-examined, in March 2014, physicists in the United States announced that indirect signals of the gravitational waves described in Einstein’s theory of gravity have been detected for the first time (Nature, March 17, 2014). If confirmed, this feat may reinforce the cosmological theory called “inflation.” Formulated in the 1980s, the inflation model claims that the universe suddenly expanded in the first fraction of a second immediately after the Big Bang – the explosion that gave birth to the universe some 13.8 billion years ago. This rapid expansion then produced gravitational waves, defined as ripples in space-time caused by intense gravitational forces. Alan Guth, of MIT, who proposed the idea of inflation in 1980, has referred to these waves as “just a jittering of matter in the universe.” Researchers with the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) project, maintained by Harvard University, observed these gravitational waves by using microwave sensors set up in the Antarctic to examine the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which was produced by the universe’s initial expansion. The difference in the distribution of temperature and matter that resulted from radiation is taken as a sign of the gravitational waves. These waves stretch and compress space as they travel, causing matter to lump together at certain intervals, thus forming galaxies. Other experiments are endeavoring to record signals of gravitational waves.
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