The Bicep2 experiment seems to have found an imprint of the primordial gravitation waves created in the very, very early universe.
While relativity was in many ways the achievement of a single human being (Einstein), the detection of gravitation waves is a triumph of team work, with scientists and engineers from many nations and cultures all working together to make a major discovery.
If he left, Dr. Bahcall warned, he would lose all his ability to help the rest of the science NASA was doing, X-ray satellites and gravitation-wave observatories that were dear to his heart as a high-energy physicist.
Because gravitation is a warping of geometry, when a gravitational wave crosses a region of space it stretches distances in one direction and shrinks them in a perpendicular direction, in an oscillating fashion.
The basic reason for this feebleness can be traced back to the sheer weakness of gravitation: electricity is a thousand trillion trillion trillion times stronger, which is why electromagnetic waves are commonplace, but gravitational waves were sidelined for decades as a mere curiosity.
Their discovery of the first binary pulsar, PSR 1913 + 16, provided an unprecedented test of Albert Einstein's theory of gravitation, which, according to the general theory of relativity, predicts that objects accelerated in a strong gravitational field will emit radiation in the form of gravitational waves.
Astrophysical relativity serves as a tool to gauge the properties of large scale structures for which gravitation plays a significant role in physical phenomena investigated and as the basis for black hole (astro physics and the study of gravitational waves.
Third, given that the gravitational waves discovered by BICEP were a quantum event (because the entire universe was so small that it had to obey quantum laws), "enlarged" many-fold by inflation, as though seen through a powerful microscope, it may imply that gravitation itself is quantized.
Unusual local features are Magnetic Hill (with its illusion of uphill gravitation) and a tidal bore, or wave, that rises 3 6 feet (1 2 metres) twice daily and surges up the Petitcodiac River.
