Astronomy: Cosmic Inflation

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Cosmic Inflation In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the very early universe. This enormous expansion supercooled the universe and ended when the energy content of the field driving inflation condensed into hot, dense particles, a process called reheating.

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Cosmic Inflation In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or jus t inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the very early universe. This enormous expansion supercooled the universe and ended when the energy content of the field driving inflation condensed into hot, dense particles, a process called reheating. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate.

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Why Cosmic Inflation matters: Cosmology addresses the deepest questions we can ask: where did the universe come from, what is it made of, and what will happen to it in the future? Inflation theory was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with notable contributions by several theoretical physicists, including Alexei Starobinsky at Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Alan Guth at Cornell University, a nd Andrei Linde at Lebedev Physical Institute. Starobinsky, Guth, and Linde won the 2014 Kavli Prize "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation". It was developed further in the early 1980s. It explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary region, magnified to cosmic size, become the seeds for the growth of structure in the Universe (see galaxy formation and evolution and structure formation). Many physicists also believe that inflation explains why the universe appears to be the same in all directions (isotropic), why the cosmic microwave background radiation is distributed evenly, why the universe is flat, and why no magnetic monopoles have been observed. The detailed particle physics mechanism responsible for inflation is unknown. A number of inflation model predictions have been confirmed by observation; for example temperature anisotropies observed by the COBE satellite in 1992 exhibit nearly scale-invariant spectra as predicted by the inflationary paradigm and WMAP results also show strong evidence for inflation. However, some scientists dissent from this position. The hypothetical field thought to be responsible for inflation is called the inflaton. In 2002, three of the original architects of the theory were recognized for their major contributions; physicists Alan Guth of M.I.T., Andrei Linde of Stanford, and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton shared the Dirac Prize "for development of the concept of inflation in cosmology". In 2012, Guth and Linde were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their invention and development of inflationary cosmology.

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Deep dive: Cosmic Inflation Starobinsky, Guth, and Linde won the 2014 Kavli Prize "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation". It was developed further in the early 1980s. It explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary region, magnified to cosmic size, become the seed s for the growth of structure in the Universe (see galaxy formation and evolution and structure formation). Many physicists also believe that inflation explains why the universe appears to be the same in all directions (isotropic), why the cosmic microwave background radiation is distributed evenly, why the universe is flat, and why no magnetic monopoles have been observed. The detailed particle physics mechanism responsible for inflation is unknown. A number of inflation model predictions have been confirmed by observation; for example temperature anisotropies observed by the COBE satellite in 1992 exhibit nearly scale-invariant spectra as predicted by the inflationary paradigm and WMAP results also show strong evidence for inflation. However, some scientists dissent from this position. The hypothetical field thought to be responsible for inflation is called the inflaton. In 2002, three of the original architects of the theory were recognized for their major contributions; physicists Alan Guth of M.I.T., Andrei Linde of Stanford, and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton shared the Dirac Prize "for development of the concept of inflation in cosmology". In 2012, Guth and Linde were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their invention and development of inflationary cosmology. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_inflation (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)