Matteo Cantiello edited BICEP2.tex  over 9 years ago

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\textbf{The rise and fall of the biggest astrophysics discovery of the century highlights the importance of open, collaborative science}.  On 17 March 2014, the \href{http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/CMB/bicep2/}{BICEP2} collaboration announced 2014 \href{http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/CMB/bicep2/}{BICEP2}, a South Pole based experiment aimed at studying  the \href{http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.3985}{first detection properties  of so-called B-mode polarization}, light emitted more than 13 billion years ago during the Big Bang, made  a possible sensational \href{http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.3985}{announcement}. They claimed to have detected the  signature of the an  exponential expansion of space in the early universe. This expansion, also called inflation, is believed to have occurred when the universe was extremely young, from $10^{-36}$ seconds after the Big Bang to sometime between $10^{−33}$ young  and$10^{−32}$ seconds. Inflation is thought to  be responsible for the existence of large-scale structures like clusters of galaxies and galaxies, as well  to explain why the universe appearsstatistically  homogeneous and isotropic, meaning that at large scales its properties are the same for all observers.