Direct Evidence for Inflation Detected

Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, developers of the idea of inflation.

The article that I posted yesterday was confirmed today by various scientists announcing their discoveries.  Using the BICEP2 telescope, these scientists have confirmed B-mode polarization patterns on the cosmic microwave background.  The implication of this discovery is that it gives a lot of information about when inflation happened, which one cosmologist approximated at .5 * 10^-37 seconds after the big bang.
Another implication is that this discovery directly proves that gravity is quantized, which sounds like a bigger deal to me but the article says that this is minor compared to the first implication.  This is also the first detection of Hawking's radiation as well as "the first detection of gravitational waves’ action on matter other than their source".  It seems like this announcement/discovery might be big enough to win a Nobel Prize.

B-modes

Source