The Daily Galaxy
“There have been hints for a while now that maybe something else is going on,” says Stanford’s Kavli Foundation Deputy Director John Carlstrom, who leads two other experiments that study the universe’s first light. “Maybe we need to… allow some new physics in there. Maybe there are more neutrinos. Maybe they’re more massive than we thought. Or maybe it’s something none of us have thought of yet.”
Last month, scientists announced the first hard evidence for cosmic inflation, the process by which the infant universe swelled from microscopic to cosmic size in an instant. This almost unimaginably fast expansion was first theorized more than three decades ago, yet only now has “smoking gun” proof emerged when the world was stunned by announcement that a telescope at the South Pole (image above) had detected a cosmic fossil from the earliest moments of creation.