Gravitational Waves
Year: 2015
If we’re going to take a small shot about Albert Einstein being wrong about his opinion for one thing, we should celebrate when he was right about something too. He described the idea of what would later be known as gravitational waves in early papers. These waves are supposedly ripples in space-time left over from the first second of the Big Bang. Those ripples generated changes in the polarization (known as B-Modes) in the cosmic microwave background, also left over from the early universe. Before 2015, we had only indirect evidence of the Big Bang but something like gravitational waves would prove it. That is why one of the most surprising scientific findings in our decade happened in 2015 when scientists observed direct evidence of cosmic expansion using the aforementioned B-modes.