Cosmic inflation is a popular scenario for the earliest phase in the evolution of the Universe CREDIT A. Ijjas, P.J. Steinhardt and A. Loeb (Scientific American, February 2017) Astrophysicists say ...

Before there was light, there was cosmic inflation. Before life, planet Earth, the first galaxies — and even before the violent explosion of hot dense primordial stuff scientists traditionally have ...

Scientists believe that in the very early universe, everything was incredibly tiny, chaotic, and full of random energy ripples, known as quantum foam. It was a state where spacetime was unstable, and ...

Cosmic inflation tries to describe one brief but crucial phase in the Big Bang that launched the universe onto its expansion course. Credit: Christine Daniloff / MIT / ESA / Hubble / NASA Many ...

The Universe is big, as Douglas Adams would say. The most distant light we can see is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. This marks the edge ...

One of the biggest scientific claims of the year has received another set-back. In March, the US BICEP team said it had found a pattern on the sky left by the rapid expansion of space just fractions ...

We'll cut right to the chase: This video of Stanford Professor Andrei Linde finding out about yesterday's big discovery of "smoking gun" evidence of cosmic inflation (the "first tremors of the big ...

The mysteries surrounding the origins of the universe have long intrigued scientists and philosophers alike. New research, published in the Living Reviews in Relativity, introduces an innovative ...

The Universe experienced a rapid expansion just after its birth, a phenomenon called cosmic inflation. This brief but intense phase left traces in the structure of spacetime. Scientists are trying to ...

Is the universe 'tuned' to support life, and ultimately us? Physicists Nemanja Kaloper and Alexander Westphal have proposed ways to test this Anthropic principle. (Image of deep star field from the ...

Last year’s reports that the BICEP2 telescope had uncovered evidence for cosmic inflation turned out to be a false alarm, but researchers in the field haven’t given up. Matthew R Francis describes how ...

Astrophysicists say that cosmic inflation – a point in the Universe’s infancy when space-time expanded exponentially, and what physicists really refer to when they talk about the ‘Big Bang’ – can in ...