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Inflation (cosmology)
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In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation is the exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang to sometime between 10-33 and 10-32 seconds. Following the inflationary period, the Universe continues to expand, but at a less accelerated rate.The inflationary hypothesis was developed in the 1980s by physicists Alan Guth and Andrei Linde. It explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary region, magnified to cosmic size, become the seeds for the growth of structure in the Universe (see galaxy formation and evolution and structure formation). Many physicists also believe that inflation explains why the Universe appears to be the same in all directions (isotropic), why the cosmic microwave background radiation is distributed evenly, why the Universe is flat, and why no magnetic monopoles have been observed.While the detailed particle physics mechanism responsible for inflation is not known, the basic picture makes a number of predictions that have been confirmed by observation. The hypothetical field thought to be responsible for inflation is called the inflaton.
^ "First Second of the Big Bang". How The Universe Works 3. 2014. Discovery Science.
^ Chapter 17 of Peebles (1993).
^ Tyson, Neil deGrasse and Donald Goldsmith (2004), Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, W. W. Norton & Co., pp. 84–5.
^ Steinhardt, Paul J. (2011). "The inflation debate: Is the theory at the heart of modern cosmology deeply flawed?" (Scientific American, April; pp. 18-25). "...in?ationary theory is powerfully predictive. For example, numerous observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation and the distribution of galaxies have con?rmed that the spatial variations in energy in the early universe were nearly scale-invariant."
^ Tsujikawa, Shinji (28 Apr 2003). "Introductory review of cosmic inflation". p. 4257. arXiv:hep-ph/0304257. Bibcode:2003hep.ph....4257T. In fact temperature anisotropies observed by the COBE satellite in 1992 exhibit nearly scale-invariant spectra as predicted by the in?ationary paradigm. Recent observations of WMAP also show strong evidence for in?ation.
^ Guth, Alan H. (1997). The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins. Basic Books. pp. 233–234. ISBN 0201328402.
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