His 1981 paper heralded the virtues of inflation — an explanation for the smoothness, flatness and longevity of the Universe as well as the heat of the Big Bang — but it also challenged his ...

The early universe experienced a phase of rapid expansion, known as inflation. For decades, cosmologists assumed that this expansion was powered by a new entity in the universe, known as the inflaton.

This period, known as cosmological inflation, lasted for only a tiny fraction of a second, but provided the initial conditions that led to the uniformly expanding Universe we see around us today. As ...

Inflation, in the context of the big bang theory, refers to the episode of exponential expansion of the very early universe indicated by particle physics' Grand Unified Theories (Extensive references ...

SPHEREx is a groundbreaking NASA telescope that will map the entire sky in infrared, revealing insights into cosmic inflation ...

These observations align with the prevailing inflationary model, which suggests that an era of rapid expansion preceded the Universe's observable state. Despite its utility, inflation theory ...

This initial period of rapid inflation set the stage for the vast and still-growing cosmos we observe today. Although astronomers cannot directly witness the universe's formation, much of what we ...