Big Bang

MIT Professor Alan Guth speaks with Here and Now’s Robin Young about recent findings that shed light on the origins of the universe and Guth’s work developing the theory of cosmic inflation.

Nature reporter Ron Cowen explores Professor Alan Guth’s theory of cosmic inflation, which scientists may have confirmed by searching for gravitational waves from the seconds after the Universe’s formation.  “Guth’s idea was that the cosmos expanded at an exponential rate for a few tens of trillionths of trillionths of trillionths of seconds after the Big Bang, ballooning from subatomic to football size.”

“Cosmic inflation, meanwhile, was proposed by MIT’s Alan Guth (who attended the CfA press conference) in 1979 and explains why the universe appears to be bigger than its age suggests,” writes Paul Rodgers in Forbes of the announcement this week that scientists had discovered evidence that confirmed Guth’s seminal work.

MIT Professor Alan Guth talks to BBC News about the new scientific evidence that appears to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the universe. Guth was one of the first physicists to propose the theory of cosmic inflation.

Los Angeles Times reporter Amina Khan explores the new findings that appear to confirm MIT Professor Alan Guth’s theory of cosmic inflation.  “Guth's inflation theory became a cornerstone of our understanding of the early universe — but scientists had thought it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove,” writes Khan.

Charles Q. Choi writes about Professor David Kaiser’s research into the last major loophole in quantum physics. “Kaiser and his colleagues have proposed looking for answers from the most remote corners of the known cosmos,” reports Choi.

Reporter Lisa Grossman interviews MIT Professor Anna Frebel about her work searching for the oldest, living stars in the universe, and her recent discovery of a star almost as old as the universe.

 “Four years ago, Anna Frebel, a young astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found an ancient star in a neighboring galaxy whose chemical composition proved nearly identical to some unusual stars on the outskirts of our own galaxy,” wrote New York Times reporter Curtis Brainard in a feature on Prof. Frebel’s work.