While the U.S. and Russia have been tussling on a variety of issues, some solid science has been going on unabated. For instance, last month the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced the discovery of gravitational waves formed when the universe was a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. While I cannot really wrap my head around the particulars, this discovery (if successfully duplicated by others) could further confirm the theory of cosmic inflation, or the idea of rapid expansion of the universe in the first 380,000 years of its existence. I found a nice scientific cartoon (really) that walks us through these ideas at
PhD Comics. And here is the
March 17th video from the Center with the scientific announcement.
The research itself involved scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the University of Minnesota, while the observations themselves were made at the
BICEP2 telescope near the South Pole
.
