Click the link below the picture
.
It all started with a bang. During an unimaginably brief fraction of a second, the embryonic universe ballooned in size with unimaginable swiftness. In a flash, dimples of imperfection stretched into cosmic scars and locked in the universe we experience today, a milieu filled with galaxies, stars, planets, and humans.
The circumstantial evidence for this origin story, known as inflation, is overwhelming. It has inspired a generation of cosmologists to write papers, teach classes, and publish textbooks about the sundry ways inflation could have played out. And yet, a smoking gun remains elusive: Ancient ripples in spacetime should have left a particular imprint on the sky, but searches have repeatedly come up short.
A group of astronomers known as the BICEP/Keck collaboration leads the hunt for these “primordial gravitational waves.” In 2021 the researchers released their latest results, the culmination of years of painstaking labor in one of the harshest places on Earth. Once more, they found no sign of their quarry. If an inflating universe reverberated with gravitational waves—as most cosmologists still fully expect it did— it must have done so in a rather subtle way.
.
Fingerprints of reverberations from the first moment could be hiding in the universe’s oldest light, but astronomers haven’t found them yet. ESA and the Planck Collaboration
.
.
Click the link below for the article:
.
__________________________________________
James' World 2 
Leave a comment