cosmic inflation

Until recently, it was assumed that what caused the Big Bang would remain forever unknown. But a wave of theoretical studies has placed the genesis scenario within reach. Inflation answers the classic question of the big bang cosmology: why does the universe appear flat, when one would expect it to be highly curved? Inflation also explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. A breakthrough occurred in the early 1980’s when investigations of the interaction of the smallest subdivisions of matter, also known as quantum physics, began to have obvious applications in astronomy. Inflation was proposed in 1981 by Alan Guth. His inflation model is now of huge importance in what is known as the 'Big Bang'. Guth’s most current research is related to the connections between inflation and the string theory. George F. Smoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and John C. Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland were awarded The Nobel Prize for depicting the universe as it was 380,000 years after its birth in the Big Bang. What they did, precisely measured the faint light that revealed the seeds of today’s galaxies and super clusters, affirming the big-bang. Smoot and Mather won the 2006 Nobel physics prize for their role as chief architects of a NASA satellite observatory named COBE, for Cosmic Background Explorer. Launched in 1989, the spacecraft measured remnants of light that originated in the history of the universe, about 380,000 years after the big bang. New attempts to explain the early moments of creation to predict a universe that can evolve naturally into the one we see are being taken very seriously, without some of those loose ends associated with previous theories.