Gravitational waves
4 articles-
What to Savor about the Discovery of Gravity Waves
What will come with the ability to detect gravitational waves? Nergis Mavalvala can’t wait to find out.Image by LLacertae / Flickr Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . You may have once startled a duck or two after tossing a rock into a pond to watch the water ripple. But […] -
What If the Universe Didn’t Start With the Big Bang?
Last week, researchers using the Planck spacecraft to study the skies announced that the polarization of light spotted by the BICEP2 experiment could be entirely explained by dust swirling around the Milky Way. This news was a bucket of cold water on the theories of many cosmologists: It meant that BICEP2 might not have been […] -
The Father of Inflation Clears Up a Big Misunderstanding
Last week researchers working on the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica announced that they’d seen solid evidence of gravitational waves that emerged very early in the Universe’s history. This discovery lent support to inflation, a theory of cosmology long popular among physicists but still lacking in direct proof. (To learn more about the recent discovery and […] -
Over the Universe—The Best Reactions to the Big Physics News
These swirls in the cosmic microwave background show the effect of primordial gravitational waves.BICEP2 Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Scientists, on the whole, are a circumspect lot. When faced with a microphone or reporter’s notepad, most of them (excepting a vocal minority) hedge and temper their language, adding […]