We Need Three Planets to Keep the Human Race Alive, NASA Scientist Says.

It’s no secret that uncurbed climate change and population growth are going to (and already have) put stress on the planet. But the situation is getting so bad that one prominent NASA scientist says we have to start thinking about terraforming Mars and that, in order for the human race to survive at current levels, we will eventually “need at least three planets.”

“The entire ecosystem is crashing,” Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist of NASA’s Langley Research Center said Thursday. “Essentially, there’s too many of us. We’ve been far too successful as the human animal. People allege we’re short 40-50 percent of a planet now. As the Asians and their billions come up to our living systems, we’re going to need three more planets.”

Bushnell was discussing the release of The Millennium Project’s “State of the Future,” an annual report that looks at global challenges and how they might be solved. He said that Mars is a good start, but we’d soon need even more space to live.

“If NASA terraforms Mars, that’ll take about 120 years, and that’s only one planet,” he said. “We’d need more shortly.”

It’s not the first time someone has floated the need for humans to colonize other planets, but usually such ideas are proposed as a way for the human race to survive in the event of a cataclysmic asteroid collision or nuclear war. In 2012, the World Wildlife Fund also suggested the three-planet idea, stating that we're using about 50 percent more resources than the Earth can support, and that by 2050 we’d need three planets to sustain that rate.

Bushnell didn’t say when he thought we might need three planets or what planets those might be—Mars is a good start, but beyond that, the Solar System is looking pretty barren as far as terraform-able planets go. 

"The point isn’t to be alarmist or cynical, says Jerome Glenn, CEO of the Millennium Project. It’s about identifying the challenges Earth faces and finding a way to rise above them. “We have no right to be pessimistic. We have to find out what’s intelligent to do to make this species survive,” he told me. “If you think the problems aren’t going to get better, then why try. And if you think there aren’t problems, then why change anything?”

In any case, Bushnell wasn’t suggesting that we absolutely need to leave the Earth—he was saying that we need to stop consuming like we are. He’s got one solution in mind: Salt water farming.

Halophytes, a class of plant that grows well in salt water, could potentially be used to create biofuel by growing plants in the middle of the oceans (or at least using salt water to irrigate plants we do have in agriculturally-unproductive parts of the world). Scientists are working on the possibility, and an MIT project suggested that some pilot programs started in India, Pakistan, Laos, Algeria, and other poor countries should be started sometime this year, but so far, not much progress has been made. Bushnell says it’d solve most of our problems.

“If you grew halophytes on wastelands using seawater, in 10-15 years you’d have fuel that cost $50 a barrel. That’s half of what petroleum costs today,” he said. “With that, you could solve land, food, water, energy, and climate. All of that comes together.”

If we can’t do that, it just may be time to start buying land on Mars.

Source: MOTHERBOARD

A Massive Solar Superstorm Nearly Blasted The Earth In 2012.

Back on July 23, 2012 a furious solar magnetic storm just grazed our planet. Had it erupted just nine days earlier, it would have hit us, causing extensive damage to our technological infrastructure. It would have been a geomagnetic catastrophe the likes of which we've never seen. Scientists say the close shave should serve as an important wake-up call.

We actually have a precedent for such an event, but it happened back in the mid 19th Century. It was called the Carrington Event of 1859, and it damaged the few electronic devices that existed at the time, namely telegraph systems. The solar blast managed to shock some telegraph operators and set fire to their offices. It even caused the Northern Lights to shine so bright and so far south that people could read newspapers by its red and green glow as far as Mexico.

More recently, a severe magnetic storm in 1989 wreaked havoc on Canada's Hydro-Quebec power grid, resulting in a power-out that kept six-million people without electricity for nine hours.

Back To The Dark Ages

Several years ago, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that, if a Carrington-like event occurred today, it could cause $1- to $2-trillion in damages to our civilization's high-tech infrastructure and require four to ten years for complete recovery. Last year, Lloyds put out a study showing that geomagnetic storms could cause upwards of $2.6 trillion in damages across the globe.

And what a headache it would be. An event like this would damage everything from satellites, emergency services' systems, hospital equipment, banking systems, and air traffic control devices, through to everyday items such as home computers, iPods and GPSs. Because of our heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion dollar damage bill and cataclysmic-scale problems for governments.

Worse than this, however, would be the potential length of blackouts. According to a Metatech Corporation study, an event like the 1921 geomagnetic storm would result in large-scale blackouts affecting more than 130 million people and would expose more than 350 transformers to the risk of permanent damage. It could take months—if not years—to put everybody back on the grid.

And as a new analysis from UC Berkeley's Ying D. Liu and Janet Luhmann show, it almost happened two years ago.

A Perfect Solar Storm

Using data detected by NASA's STEREO A spacecraft, the researchers concluded that a huge outburst on the sun on July 22, 2012 propelled a magnetic cloud through the solar wind at a speed of more than 2,000 kilometers per second — nearly four times the typical speed of a magnetic storm. It violated our orbit, but Earth and all the other planets were on the other side of the sun at the time.

When the storm hit STEREO A it was about 120 degrees ahead of the Earth (west of the Earth). Had it occurred nine days earlier — one third of the rotation period of the Sun (which takes 27 days to complete one rotation) — it would have propagated directly towards the Earth.

Here's what it looked like from STEREO's perspective:

The outburst was generated by two nearly simultaneous coronal mass ejections (separated by about 10 to 15 minutes), releasing energies equal to about a billion hydrogen bombs. But that alone wasn't enough to create the intensity observed. According to the analysis, the incredible speed of the magnetic cloud was possible because of another mass ejection four days earlier which had cleared the path of material that would have slowed it down.

The storm also produced a long-duration, southward-oriented magnetic field, which made it all the more dangerous. This is a nasty orientation owing to Earth's northward field. This causes a process called reconnection, resulting in a violent merger.

"These gnarly, twisty ropes of magnetic field from coronal mass ejections come blasting from the sun through the ambient solar system, piling up material in front of them, and when this double whammy hits Earth, it skews the Earth's magnetic field to odd directions, dumping energy all around the planet," explained Luhmann in a statement.

Predicting the Weather

According to the researchers, this event is not as rare as it might seem. It could have easily been missed if STEREO A (the spacecraft ahead of us in Earth's orbit) had not been there to record it.

"People keep saying that these are rare natural hazards, but they are happening in the solar system even though we don't always see them," noted Luhmann. "It's like with earthquakes — it is hard to impress upon people the importance of preparing unless you suffer a magnitude 9 earthquake."

Indeed, preparation is possible. Further study of solar superstorms and the sun's 11 year cycle should help our predictive abilities. But we also need to create more robust technologies to protect ourselves for this eventuality. NASA, for example, has proposed a solar shield to protect power grids from geomagnetic storms. We certainly need to start thinking along these lines to prevent a world-changing catastrophe.

Source: io9

World's Most Advanced Computers Unravel the Universe's Most Primitive Processes (Op-Ed)

The visualiztion, Magnetic Fields in Core-Collapse Supernovae depicts the magnetic field inside the shock surface of a supernova, and was created using the GenASIS code on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilitypetascale computer, Jaguar, work that continues on Titan. Credit: Eirik Endeve, Christian Cardall, Reuben Budiardja, Anthony Mezzacappa, Dave Pugmire.

Gregory Scott Jones, a writer who covers supercomputing. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

There is an idea, popular in New Age circles, that humans represent the universe's primary self-awareness.

In other words, our consciousness is actually the Cosmos realizing it exists; is mankind the only creature to ever look up at the sky and know the vast distances to the stars, or the fact that we are physically the product of their demise? This is, I imagine, the sort of thing Carl Sagan had in mind when he said "humans are the stuff of the cosmos examining itself." Far out for sure.

But this self-awareness, if it's indeed real, presents many questions. Big ones. And we're getting answers thanks to those primitively simulated brains we call computers. Big ones. The Universe, it seems, has begun to write its autobiography.

The irony is hard to ignore. The idea that some of the most advanced machines in the modern world will piece together the most basic processes in all of time is rapidly becoming a reality.

Today's supercomputers are necessary for solving an entire range of complex scientific challenges, from the complexities of climate change to the properties of new materials to the ideal aerodynamics of vehicle design. But few problems require such massive computing power as do those born in the heavens.

Unfortunately, recreating the Big Bang and watching the universe unfold in a laboratory is out of the question for obvious reasons. But with empirical data from satellites, probes and seriously powerful telescopes, and the simulation potential of computers pushing 30 petaflops — or 30 thousand trillion (quadrillion) calculations per second — scientists are getting a much clearer picture of how this whole universe thing unraveled, and how we came to be.

Observation reveals what was created in the early moments of the universe: The cosmic microwave background, or CMB, represents the dawn of time just after (well, about 378,000 years after) the Big Bang. Its current geography is the result of roughly 14 billion years of formation, plenty of time for researchers to play with piecing the puzzle together.

But we're getting there, one step at a time. For example, thanks to decades of observation and extremely sophisticated applications running across many thousands of processors, a team of researchers led by Salman Habib is using Argonne National Laboratory's Mira and Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputers to see how tiny variations in the Big Bang can grow to form enormous clumps that now host stars and galaxies.

The simulations take place across billions of light years of space in thousands of time steps with the potential to squash or validate theories and confirm or disprove much of what we thought we knew about how the universe behaves, including the elusive "dark energy," the reigning champion in our quest to explain how the universe expands, and why the expansion rate is currently accelerating.

Supercomputers are necessary for such complex simulations, principal investigator Salman Habib has said, due to their sheer speed, massive amounts of memory and their communication-oriented architectures. Habib's application achieved a sustained performance in excess of ten petaflops, completely out of reach just years ago, allowing the team to witness the evolution of the universe from the largest scales down to those characteristic of galaxies.

"In a way supercomputers compress the enormous reaches of space and time that are characteristic of the cosmos, and allow us to interact with them on the — by comparison — incredibly short scales of human perception," said Habib.

If the Universe is self-aware, simulating its creation is akin to forcing it to watch embarrassing home movies of its childhood.

But what about us? After all, if we are in fact the latest and greatest universal incarnation, where is our birth story? Consider core-collapse supernovas (CCSNs), or stars greater than eight times the size of our sun, but no greater than around 40 times.

These massive elemental factories self-implode, a violent act that leaves in its place all the elements up to iron, i.e., all of the necessary ingredients for life. When Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang "we are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon," they had CCSNs in mind, whether they knew it or not.

Researchers can now simulate in three dimensions many of the implosions that created us, a feat impossible just a couple of years ago. We now know that neutrinos play a significant, if not the dominant, role in these massive elemental creation events, as a team of researchers using the Titan supercomputer located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is achieving neutrino-driven explosions across a range of stellar masses in two dimensions, giving credibility to their model.

The same team used Jaguar, Titan's predecessor, to explain how a neutron star could become the more rapidly rotating pulsar, a problem featured on the cover of the June 1, 2012, issue of Science, which explored the top unsolved problems in astrophysics. Known as the standing accretion shock instability, or SASI, researchers now have a relevant description of how a rotating neutron star picks up steam, work that was recently validated by observation in the February 20, 2014, issue of Nature.

Forget about home movies. This is the universe staring at its reflection in the mirror.

These monumental developments are occurring across a wide range of astrophysics and cosmology, from black hole accretion to the formation of individual planets and stars, fields with concepts so vast that it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a computer powerful enough to ever resolve them completely. Nevertheless, the potential for the world's latest and greatest calculators to solve the biggest questions, both metaphorically and literally, is potentially limitless, as are the questions. The universe is, after all, a very old and very large place.

Our best estimate of the structure of the universe as we know it, the standard model, accounts for roughly 5 percent of its total mass; the rest we embarrassingly refer to as "dark matter." We can't see it, can't feel it, can only infer it. The resolution and definition of dark matter and "dark energy" would be among the most significant scientific achievements of all time, and simulations on the world's most powerful computers will doubtless play a large role.

But problems of this magnitude will no doubt require technologies more powerful than today's leading systems. Luckily for us, the next era is unfolding before our very eyes. The world's fastest computers may soon approach the exascale, capable of crunching quintillions of calculations per second, or nearly an entire order of magnitude faster than current systems. And once again the most advanced machines on the planet will be called upon to answer the most fundamental questions: Who are we? And where do we come from?

Our earliest history is intimately connected with our near future. The universe must think it's pretty smart.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This article was originally published on Live Science.

Ancient Earth hammered by double space impact

We've all seen the films where an asteroid hurtles towards our planet, threatening civilisation.

What's less well known is that menacing space rocks sometimes come in twos.

Researchers have outlined some of the best evidence yet for a double space impact, where an asteroid and its moon apparently struck Earth in tandem.

Using tiny, plankton-like fossils, they established that neighbouring craters in Sweden are the same age - 458 million years old.

Details of the work were presented at the 45th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, and the findings are to be published in the Meteoritics and Planetary Science journal.

However, other scientists cautioned that seemingly contemporary craters could have landed weeks, months or even years apart.

A handful of possible double impacts (or doublets) are already known on Earth, but Dr Jens Ormo says there are disputes over the precision of dates assigned to these craters.

"Double impact craters must be of the same age, otherwise they could just be two craters right next to each other," the researcher from the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, told BBC News.

Dr Ormo and his colleagues studied two craters called Lockne and Malingen, which lie about 16km apart in northern Sweden. Measuring about 7.5km wide, Lockne is the bigger of the two structures; Malingen, which lies to the south-west, is about 10 times smaller.

Binary asteroids are thought to form when a so-called "rubble pile" asteroid begins to spin so fast under the influence of sunlight that loose rock is thrown out from the object's equator to form a small moon.

Telescope observations suggest that about 15% of near-Earth asteroids are binaries, but the percentage of impact craters on Earth is likely to be smaller.

Only a fraction of the binaries that strike the Earth will have the necessary separation between the asteroid and its moon to produce separate craters (those that are very close together will carve out overlapping structures).

Calculations suggest around 3% of impact craters on Earth should be doublets - a figure that agrees with the number of candidates already identified by researchers.

The unusual geological characteristics of both Lockne and Malingen have been recognised since the first half of the 20th Century. But it took until the mid-1990s for Lockne to be formalised as a terrestrial impact crater.

In the last few years, Dr Ormo has drilled about 145m down into the Malingen structure, through the sediment that fills it, down to crushed rocks known as breccias and deeper, reaching the intact basement rock.

Lab analysis of the breccias revealed the presence of shocked quartz, a form of the quartz mineral that is created under intense pressures and is associated with asteroid strikes.

This area was covered by a shallow sea at the time of the Lockne impact, so marine sediments would have begun to fill in any impact craters immediately after they were created.

One-two punch

Dr Ormo's team set out to date the Malingen structure using tiny fossilised sea creatures called chitinozoans, which are found in sedimentary rocks at the site.

Their method, known as biostratigraphy, allows geologists to assign relative ages to rocks based on the types of fossil creatures found within them.

The results revealed the Malingen structure to be the same age as Lockne - about 458 million years old. This seems to confirm that the area was rocked by a double asteroid strike during the Ordovician Period.

Dr Gareth Collins, who studies impact cratering at Imperial College London, and was not involved with the research, told BBC News: "Short of witnessing the impacts, it is impossible to prove that two closely separated craters were formed simultaneously.

"But the evidence in this case is very compelling. Their proximity in space and consistent age estimates makes a binary-impact cause likely."

Simulations suggest the asteroid that created Lockne was some 600m in diameter, while the one that carved out Malingen was about 250m. These measurements are somewhat larger than might be suggested by their craters because of the mechanics of impacts into marine environments.

Dr Ormo added that Malingen and Lockne were just the right distance apart to have been created by a binary. As mentioned, if two space rocks are too close, their craters will overlap. But to qualify as a doublet, the craters can't be too far apart, because they will exceed the maximum distance at which an asteroid and its moon can stay bound by gravitational forces.

"The Lockne impactor was big enough to generate what's known as an atmospheric blow-out, where you blow away the atmosphere above the impact site," said Dr Ormo.

This can cause material from the asteroid strike to spread around the globe, as happened during the huge Chicxulub impact thought to have killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

The Ordovician event wasn't powerful enough for that material to be traced, as it would have been very dilute in the atmosphere. But the impact would have had regional effects; for example, any sea creatures unlucky enough to be swimming nearby would have been instantly vaporised.

Other candidate double impact craters include Clearwater East and West in Quebec, Canada; Kamensk and Gusev in southern Russia; and Ries and Stenheim in southern Germany.

Source: BBC News

Saturn’s Largest Moon Would Host Really, Really Weird Life

Ah, Titan. Saturn’s largest, haziest moon had a brief starring role in last night’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Toward the end of the episode, Neil DeGrasse Tyson eases his spaceship into one of the moon’s dark, oily seas. He wanted to see what was down there—more specifically, what kind of life might be down there.

After spending most of an hour describing the evolution of life on Earth, it was time to turn toward alien terrains and chemistries—to a place that, while not so very far away, could host some very, very strange lifeforms.

“There’s a world I want to take you to, a world far different from our own, but one that may harbor life. If it does, it promises to be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before,” Tyson says, in the episode.

Titan is deceptively Earth-like. It has a thick, nitrogen atmosphere. Seasonal rainstorms produce wet patches that are visible from orbit. It has lakes. In fact, Titan is the only place in the solar system, besides Earth, with stable liquids on its surface. Those liquids flow through rivers and streams, pool into lakes and seas, sculpt shorelines and surround islands, just like on Earth.

But Titan’s puddles aren’t filled with water—the moon is soaked in hydrocarbons. Methane and ethane, compounds that are gassy on Earth, are liquid on Titan’s frigid surface. Here, temperatures hover around -179 Celsius (or -290 Fahrenheit). It’s so cold that water ice is rock-hard—in fact, the rocks littering the moon’s surface are made from water. Water is everywhere on Titan, but it’s locked in a state that’s inaccessible for life-sustaining chemistries.

Ask an astrobiologist about the prospect of finding life on Titan, and they’ll say the shrouded, orange moon is the place to go if you’re looking for bizarre life. Life that’s not at all like what we know on Earth. Life that, instead of being water-based, uses those slick, liquid hydrocarbons as a solvent. Life that, if we find it, would demonstrate a second genesis—a second origin—and be suggestive of the ease with which life can populate the cosmos.

Life that’s worth taking a chance to find?

“We will never know if liquid water is the only special solvent in which life can form and propagate unless we go and sample these damn lakes and seas,” planetary scientist Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University said during a recent astrobiology conference. Lunine has spent years studying Titan; at one point, he and his colleagues designed a spacecraft that could land on the moon and float in one of its hydrocarbon seas [pdf].

Thinking about life on Titan isn’t new. In the 1970s, Carl Sagan and chemist Bishun Khare, then at Cornell University, were already publishing papers describing the organic chemistry that might be taking place on the Saturnian moon. At that point, though, the large bodies of liquid on the moon’s surface hadn’t yet been spotted, so Sagan and Khare were thinking about the types of reactions that might be taking place in the moon’s atmosphere (in 1982, Sagan and Stanley Dermott proposed that such lakes might exist). Later, Sagan and Khare would show it was possible to make amino acids using the elements found in the moon’s haze.

In the 1990s, the Hubble space telescope offered hints of a wet world, but it wouldn’t be until NASA’s Cassini mission that scientists got a good look at the moon. In 2004, the spacecraft began peering beneath Titan’s cloudy shroud; in 2005, Cassini sent the Huygens probe parachuting through the haze to a spot on Titan’s equator. Data sent back to Earth revealed a world that looks very much like ours—just with a completely different chemistry.

What that different chemistry means for the possibility of life is still speculative.

“Think about life on Earth—we’re all either in water or we’re fancy bags of water,” says astrobiologist Kevin Hand of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “On Titan, life in the lakes would be ‘bags’ of liquid methane and/or ethane. That 90[Kelvin] liquid would be the solvent and then whatever is dissolved into the lakes would be the material that’s used to build the other components needed for life, and to power metabolism.”

Powering metabolism is tricky at those temperatures, though, which is one of the reasons why some scientists are hesitant to focus on sending a probe to Titan. Nonetheless, astrobiologists are studying the reactions and pathways that life might use to gain some traction on Titan—including things like breathing hydrogen and eating acetylene.

“Which elements are easy and which elements are hard to access if you’re a ‘weird’ microbe living in Titan’s lakes?” Hand says. “At this point we don’t really know—work is ongoing.”

I had a few questions after watching the Cosmos depiction of Titan’s alien seas. First, if I were a weird life form on Titan, would I be able to see Saturn through Titan’s hundreds of kilometers of haze? Or would the most spectacular planetscape in the solar system be hidden behind that smoggy curtain?

“Even with the human eye, Saturn would be visible as a faint, bright-ish blob in the nighttime haze,” Lunine says. “And if you have eyes that extend even a bit beyond human sight into the nearest part of the infrared, the ringed world would be clearly seen floating ethereally in the skies of Titan.”

Phew.

Second, the scene with Tyson in the spacecraft shows a craggy, chaotic seafloor, with things that look like hydrothermal vents. How much do we really know about Titan’s seafloors?

Turns out, we know quite a lot about Titan’s seashores, and slightly less about its seafloors. Until now, scientists had mostly used seashore shapes and surrounding topography to infer what the seafloors might be like. But in May 2013, Lunine and his colleagues aimed the Cassini spacecraft’s radar at the depths of Ligeia Mare, the second largest sea on Titan (Kraken Mare, which Tyson took a swim in, is the largest). Using the radar data, the team created a map of the sea’s floor—its bathymetry—and saw that Ligeia Mare plunges to a depth of 160 meters (524 feet). The northern seabed is gentler and smoother than the southern, which is riven with flooded valleys and punctuated by steep peaks.

Getting the depth profile meant that scientists could estimate how much liquid hydrocarbon rests in Ligeia Mare: As much as 100 times more than the oil and gas reserves on Earth combined.

Next up? Peering into the depth of Kraken Mare, which covers an area of at least 400,000 square kilometers, or approximately equal to the size of Germany. “Kraken appears to consist of no fewer than three distinct basins, each about the size of Ligeia Mare,” Lunine says. “So there’s a lot of sea to see on Titan.”

Source: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Cosmic inflation: 'Spectacular' discovery hailed

Scientists say they have extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe.

Researchers believe they have found the signal left in the sky by the super-rapid expansion of space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after everything came into being.

It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes.

The work will be scrutinised carefully, but already there is talk of a Nobel.

"This is spectacular," commented Prof Marc Kamionkowski, from Johns Hopkins University.

"I've seen the research; the arguments are persuasive, and the scientists involved are among the most careful and conservative people I know," he told BBC News.

The breakthrough was announced by an American team working on a project known as BICEP2.

This has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky.

The aim has been to try to find a residual marker for "inflation" - the idea that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

Theory holds that this would have taken the infant Universe from something unimaginably small to something about the size of a marble. Space has continued to expand for the nearly 14 billion years since.

Inflation was first proposed in the early 1980s to explain some aspects of Big Bang Theory that appeared to not quite add up, such as why deep space looks broadly the same on all sides of the sky. The contention was that a very rapid expansion early on could have smoothed out any unevenness.

But inflation came with a very specific prediction - that it would be associated with waves of gravitational energy, and that these ripples in the fabric of space would leave an indelible mark on the oldest light in the sky - the famous Cosmic Microwave Background.

The BICEP2 team says it has now identified that signal. Scientists call it B-mode polarisation. It is a characteristic twist in the directional properties of the CMB. Only the gravitational waves moving through the Universe in its inflationary phase could have produced such a marker. It is a true "smoking gun".

Speaking at the press conference to announce the results, Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and a leader of the BICEP2 collaboration, said: "This is opening a window on what we believe to be a new regime of physics - the physics of what happened in the first unbelievably tiny fraction of a second in the Universe."

The signal is reported to be quite a bit stronger than many scientists had dared hope. This simplifies matters, say experts. It means the more exotic models for how inflation worked are no longer tenable.

The results also constrain the energies involved - at 10,000 trillion gigaelectronvolts. This is consistent with ideas for what is termed Grand Unified Theory, the realm where particle physicists believe three of the four fundamental forces in nature can be tied together.

But by associating gravitational waves with an epoch when quantum effects were so dominant, scientists are improving their prospects of one day pulling the fourth force - gravity itself - into a Theory of Everything.

The sensational nature of the discovery means the BICEP2 data will be subjected to intense peer review.

It is possible for the interaction of CMB light with dust in our galaxy to produce a similar effect, but the BICEP2 group says it has carefully checked its data over the past three years to rule out such a possibility.

Other experiments will now race to try to replicate the findings. If they can, a Nobel Prize seems assured for this field of research.

Who this would go to is difficult to say, but leading figures on the BICEP2 project and the people who first formulated inflationary theory would be in the running.

One of those pioneers, Prof Alan Guth from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the BBC: "I have been completely astounded. I never believed when we started that anybody would ever measure the non-uniformities of the CMB, let alone the polarisation, which is now what we are seeing.

"I think it is absolutely amazing that it can be measured and also absolutely amazing that it can agree so well with inflation and also the simplest models of inflation - nature did not have to be so kind and the theory didn't have to be right."

British scientist Dr Jo Dunkley, who has been searching through data from the European Planck space telescope for a B-mode signal, commented: "I can't tell you how exciting this is. Inflation sounds like a crazy idea, but everything that is important, everything we see today - the galaxies, the stars, the planets - was imprinted at that moment, in less than a trillionth of a second. If this is confirmed, it's huge."

Source: BBC News