Astronomers’ detection of echoes of Big Bang is set to resonate

Astronomers have announced they have discovered what many consider the holy grail of their field: ripples in the fabric of space-time that are echoes of the massive expansion of the universe that took place just after the Big Bang.

Predicted by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago, the discovery of gravitational waves would be the final piece in one of the greatest achievements of the human intellect: an understanding of how the universe began.

"Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today," John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, who led the research, said.

Gravitational waves are feeble, primordial undulations that propagate across the cosmos at the speed of light. Astronomers have sought them for decades because they are the missing evidence for two theories.

One is Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1915, which launched the modern era of research into the origins and evolution of the cosmos. The general theory explains gravity as the deformation of space by massive bodies. Einstein posited that space is like a flimsy blanket, with embedded stars and planets causing it to curve rather than remain flat.

Those curvatures of space are not stationary, Einstein said. Instead, the gravitational waves propagate like water in a lake or seismic waves in earth's crust.