Seeing the 'real' Big Bang through gravitational waves
By Paul Sutter about 5 hours ago
The earliest and most momentous epoch in the history of the universe released a flood of gravitational waves, tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time.
Now, new research shows how future detections of these primordial gravitational waves can reveal the inner workings of a process called reheating, which may be the origin of the "real" Big Bang.
Astronomers aren't exactly sure what happened when the universe was less than a second old, but they do know it was something eventful.
Cosmological observations have revealed that the universe is too smooth and too uniform on the very largest of scales given the standard picture of the Big Bang and the known age of the universe. Distant regions of the universe have roughly the same temperature despite being separated by billions of light-years. There just hasn't been enough time in the history of the cosmos for those regions to exchange heat.
More:
https://www.space.com/big-bang-study-with-gravitational-waves?utm_source=notification