Waves of gravity that rippled through space right after the Big Bang have been detected for the first time, a US research team said on Monday, in a landmark discovery made in part by Taiwanese Stanford University assistant physics professor Kuo Chao-lin (郭兆林).
The waves are evidence of a rapid growth spurt 14 billion years ago, and provide a long-awaited answer to the last untested element of Albert Einstein’s nearly century-old theory of general relativity.
The “first direct evidence of cosmic inflation” was announced by experts at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Kuo, who graduated from National Taiwan University’s Department of Physics in 1994 and received a doctorate in astrophysics from UC Berkeley in 2003, once said that the South Pole is the best place to do research.
The discovery was made with the help of a telescope, stationed at the South Pole, that measures the oldest light in the universe.
If confirmed by other experts, the work could be a contender for the Nobel Prize.
The waves that move through space and time have been described as the “first tremors of the Big Bang.”
The research team’s detection confirms an integral connection between Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the stranger conceptual realm of quantum mechanics.
“Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today. A lot of work by a lot of people has led up to this point,” said John Kovac, leader of the BICEP2 collaboration at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The telescope’s location at the South Pole “is the closest you can get to space and still be on the ground,” Kovac said.
The telescope targeted an area of sky known as the “Southern Hole” outside the galaxy, where there is little dust or extra galactic material to interfere with what humans could see with the potent sky-peering tool.
By observing the cosmic microwave background, or a faint glow left over from the Big Bang, small fluctuations gave scientists new clues about the conditions in the early universe.
The gravitational waves rippled through the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and these images were captured by the telescope.
Harvard theorist Avi Loeb said the findings provide “new insights into some of our most basic questions: Why do we exist? How did the universe begin?”
“These results are not only a smoking gun for inflation, they also tell us when inflation took place and how powerful the process was,” Loeb said.
Additional reporting by CNA
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching