A more recent discovery...

...was made by a man named Alan Guth who was one of the first physicists to hypothesize the existence of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. A team of astronomer recently detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old.

This discovery is vital because the theory of inflation has now been proven true.