How giant detectors will open up space
About 10 billion-trillion-trillionths of a second into the start of creation in the big bang, the universe is believed to have had a brief but absurdly fast growth spurt. This episode, called inflation, was so cataclysmic that the very fabric of space and time was set juddering with gravitational waves (GWs). By comparison, the GWs that were first detected six years ago to much fanfare were small-scale affairs caused by black holes colliding. But now scientists at the European Space Agency (Esa) are setting their sights on grander targets – they might soon be able to detect the faint echoes of the universe’s inflationary birth throes, almost 14bn years after the event, using the largest instrument ever built. Hundreds of times bigger than the Earth, Esa’s planned gravitational wave detector will float in space and look for wobbles in spacetime caused by immense astrophysical convulsions.
The first GW was identified in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave
