New York:
Researchers have launched a new experiment on a balloon in Antarctica, that uses a set of six telescopes, to investigate the Big Bang.
The set of telescopes known as Spider or Suborbital Polarimeter for Inflation, Dust and the Epoch of Reionisation, will circle the continent and observe a haze of faint microwaves that envelop space.
These microwaves are thought to be the fading remnants of the primordial fireball in which the universe started expanding 13.8 billion years ago, New York Times reported.
The telescopes, built by an international collaboration led by physicists from California Institute of Technology and the Princeton University, are designed to detect faint curlicues in the polarisation of the microwaves.
According to a widely held theory known as inflation, such curls would have been caused by violent disruptions of space-time when the universe began expanding, a sliver of a moment after time as we think we understand it began.
Spider will observe the microwaves in two wavelengths that will allow them to distinguish dust from primordial space-time ripples.
The experiment will also have the advantage of being above the atmosphere.