Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation telescope in Antarctica found first direct evidence of cosmic inflation

In case you have missed it, an official announcement of the experimental detection of gravitational waves were experimentally was made yesterday by the BICEP2 collaboration. Press release by the Havard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics can be found here and further coverage here.

A very interesting video explaining the phenomena can be found here on the Space Travel Foundation Blog.

One of the great thing about a scientific theories and models is that not only should it be able to explain one or more known phenomena but it should be able to have some predictive components (which allows to prove or disprove the model/theory!). The detected waves are part of the predictions made by the inflationary model. While the absence of the waves would mean that the theory is wrong (in part or completely), the experimental observation (if confirmed) is a vindication of the model.

To be followed but extremely exciting.