Ripples in space-time, new research shows, may soon give scientists a glimpse of the universe as it looked a tiny fraction of a second after its birth. That’s the moment when the initial runaway expansion of the universe ended in a burst of tremendous turbulence, shaking the fabric of space-time so violently that it’s reverberating faintly even today, according to some cosmological models.
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Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these waves in his general theory of relativity, which unifies time and space into a four-dimensional space-time. Gravitational effects of the birth of the universe and other extreme events can send distortions in space-time rippling outward as what scientists call gravitational waves.