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Published online 15 April 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.755
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Deflating inflation?
A controversial analysis questions the standard model of the early universe.
Could the Big Bang have come not at the beginning of the universe, but after a long, slow period of shrinkage?
That's one theory bolstered by a new analysis of the Big Bang's afterglow, which shows that the early universe did not inflate with the smoothness that many theorists expected.
“The standard, canonical models will be ruled out if this holds,” says Amit Yadav, an astronomer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Interesting research. I'm wondering, though: "then the field died out, creating (...) an afterglow of microwave radiation." I was always under the impression that inflation happened within the first second after the Big Bang, and that CMB was generated roughly 380.000 years afterwards, when atoms condensed from nuclei and electrons, and light could travel unimpeded. Is this antiquated knowledge?
Sanne, your understanding of the generation of the CMB is correct and up-to-date. However, the CMB preserves evidence of the fluctuations that formed before inflation (in the current most popular paradigm). We think we understand the physics of what happened after inflation rather well, so measuring the fluctuations in the CMB can give us an idea of what went on at much earlier times.