io9 reports Incredible Discovery Provides Evidence for the Big Bang Theory "Kamionkowski and his team were there to announce that B-modes of gravitational waves have been detected in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Put simply, this is the best evidence yet that our universe was formed when a very large explosion known as the Big Bang started a process that physicists call 'inflation.' As a result of this rapid inflation of physical space, everything in the universe was born.
Gravitational waves have been observed before, but the B-mode polarization is something new. This is a kind of gravitational wave that cosmological theorists have predicted would peak during those first 10-34 seconds of the primordial universe when we exploded from nothing into everything. So this announcement today confirms our first real observations of early inflation. Now that we can see B-mode gravitational waves, those observations put limits on just what happened when our universe was young, and how it got to be way it is today."
Update: Here's the theory's inventor being surprised with the news. This might well earn him the Nobel Prize.
and here's the NY TImes article, Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang
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