Just last month, scientists shared new evidence on what happened right after the Big Bang. Today, scientists said they found out what happened BEFORE the Big Bang!
"The new work comes from the Tachyonic Retrospective Inferences of Cosmologically Extrapolated Preconditions, or TRICEP, imager. The team managed to discern even fainter swirls, called AF modes: traces of deflatons that brought the previous incarnation of our universe crashing down."
"The AF modes are 1/200 as strong as the B modes BICEP spotted. To detect them, the 127-member TRICEP team used a telescope outfitted with a revolutionary $11 million detector knitted out of individual superconducting carbon nanotubes, paid for in part by Google and the Roman Catholic Church. As hard as it was building the telescope, hauling it to its perch on Cerro Lolita in Chile was harder, researchers say. "Word got round to the llama owners we hired that the detector involved nanotechnology and they refused to touch it," says Eric “Otter” Stratton, a graduate student at Western South Dakota State University in East Borealis. In the end, he and a dozen other students pulled the 1.2-tonne device up the 2112-meter peak on a sledge. It was worth it, Stratton says: “My Ph.D. adviser promised to shave a year off my dissertation.” "
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/04/scientists-find-imprint-universe-existed-big-bang?rss=1
(I'm sorry the link wasn't showing before!)
"The new work comes from the Tachyonic Retrospective Inferences of Cosmologically Extrapolated Preconditions, or TRICEP, imager. The team managed to discern even fainter swirls, called AF modes: traces of deflatons that brought the previous incarnation of our universe crashing down."
"The AF modes are 1/200 as strong as the B modes BICEP spotted. To detect them, the 127-member TRICEP team used a telescope outfitted with a revolutionary $11 million detector knitted out of individual superconducting carbon nanotubes, paid for in part by Google and the Roman Catholic Church. As hard as it was building the telescope, hauling it to its perch on Cerro Lolita in Chile was harder, researchers say. "Word got round to the llama owners we hired that the detector involved nanotechnology and they refused to touch it," says Eric “Otter” Stratton, a graduate student at Western South Dakota State University in East Borealis. In the end, he and a dozen other students pulled the 1.2-tonne device up the 2112-meter peak on a sledge. It was worth it, Stratton says: “My Ph.D. adviser promised to shave a year off my dissertation.” "
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/04/scientists-find-imprint-universe-existed-big-bang?rss=1
(I'm sorry the link wasn't showing before!)