The scientific world was agog earlier this week when the results of the BICEP2 project in Antarctica were announced.
There is a good deal of evidence supporting the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. However in order to explain certain features of the Universe, theorists also proposed that it expanded enormously in the first fraction of a second. The inflation theory makes a specific prediction which the BICEP2 project was testing. Their results certainly support the idea of inflation.
Obviously, further experiments need to confirm the result, but it looks like there's a Nobel Prize with somebody's name on it in the future. It sounds pretty inscrutable and exotic stuff, but scientists are
very excited.
Here is an
infographic that explains the theory and shows how the recent results confirm it.