![]() Quantum physics also forces inflation theories into very messy territory. But while certain types of gravitational waves have been detected, none of these primordial ones have yet been found to support the theory. The theory says spacetime should be warped by primordial gravitational waves that ricocheted out across the Universe with the Big Bang. One idea put forward by proponents of inflation is that theoretical particles made up something called an “inflation field” that drove inflation and then decayed into the particles we see around us today.īut even with tweaks like this, inflation makes predictions that have, at least thus far, not been confirmed. Notably, there is no definitive mechanism to trigger inflationary expansion, or a testable explanation for how the graceful ending could happen. But it seems to fit the data pretty well, and is what most people would say is most likely.”īut there have always been shortcomings with the theory. But I always say that we don't know for sure that this happened. “Inflation seems to be the thing that has enough support from the data that we can take it as the default,” says Mack. In every direction scientists point a radio telescope, the CMB looks the same, even in regions that seemingly could never have interacted with one another at any point in the history of a 13.8 billion-year- old universe. It is also a tantalising mystery for physicists. The CMB is a major source of information about what the early Universe looked like. It’s a faint, ambient radiation found everywhere in the observable Universe that dates back to that moment when the Universe first became transparent to radiation. The Cosmic Microwave Background (or “CMB”) has been a fundamental factor in every model of the Universe since it was first observed in 1965. “The main reason that it didn't die at birth is that it was the only thing people could think of to explain what they call the ‘scale invariance of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations’.” “I always regarded inflation as a very artificial theory,” says Roger Penrose, emeritus Rouse Ball professor of mathematics at Oxford University. “The inflationary paradigm has failed,” adds Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein professor in science at Princeton University, and proponent of a “Big Bounce” model. “I have to confess, I never liked inflation from the beginning,” says Neil Turok, the former director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. The Universe will become a cold, uniform soup of isolated photons. Is there a hidden code that rules the UniverseĮventually these lumps of matter will drift so far apart that they will slowly disappear, according to some models.The photo that summed up our place in the Universe.Did "dark stars" help form our universe. ![]() Radiation burst out in every direction, and the Universe was on its way to becoming the lumpy entity we see today, with vast swaths of empty space punctuated by clumps of particles, dust, stars, black holes, galaxies, radiation, and other forms of matter and energy. When things finally cooled enough for the first hydrogen atoms to form, the Universe swiftly became transparent. For the next 380,000 years, the Universe was so dense that not even light could move through it – the cosmos was an opaque, superhot plasma of scattered particles. The universe carried on expanding and cooling, but at a fraction of the initial rate. Next came “the graceful exit”, when inflation stopped. In less than a billionth of a billionth of a second, that pinpoint of a universe expanded to more than a billion, billion times its original size through a process called “cosmological inflation”. ![]() It began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago when the Universe was tiny, hot, and dense. The usual story of the Universe has a beginning, middle, and an end. To mark the end of a turbulent year, we are bringing back some of our favourite stories for BBC Future’s “Best of 2020” collection.
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