Possible Proof for Inflation to be Announced Tomorrow (Maybe)

Source


A press conference has been announced for Monday at the Havard Astrophysics center.  This website is speculating that they will announce some "Nobel Prize-worthy" evidence for the theory of cosmological inflation.  They speculate this because recently scientists at the South Pole telescope that detects microwaves might have detected some gravitational waves that originated from the big bang. 

The theory of inflation is way too complicated for me to understand but the gist of it seems to be that there are signals called B-modes which are emitted during the first 1/10000000000000000000000000000000000th (+- few orders of magnitude) of a second after the big bang.  Apparently researchers have found some signal with r = 0.2 (r is like the magnitude), which is more than they expected (r = 0.06).  They say that this bigger r value could affect galaxy formation more than previously expected.

On the article some scientist commented that if the press conference really does have evidence for inflation it could possibly lead to insight on quantum gravity.  While I have no idea what they're talking about, it seems to be a pretty important milestone in astrophysics, as well as physics in general.