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The nonprofit Simons Foundation will fund a new observatory to search for signs of stretching in the very early universe
By Clara Moskowitz on May 12, 2016

 

How did it all begin? The origin of the cosmos is probably the biggest mystery in science—but amazingly, researchers do have some hard evidence to consult in their attempts to solve it. The cosmic microwave background (CMB), a microwave fog that pervades space, is the oldest light in existence—it was released about 13.7 billion years ago when the extremely hot and dense baby universe cooled enough to allow photons to travel freely for the first time. That was about 380,000 years after the big bang, and the light has been flying through space ever since. Although the light itself is already unimaginably ancient, it may preserve a record of things that happened even earlier—specifically, it might contain imprints from gravitational waves that may have ripped through the cosmos in the very first moments of space and time.

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