Inflation
As continuation for the Cyclic Universe and earlier blogs I continue a bit deeper what happened in very beginning of the Universe. Modern cosmology suggests that the early universe may have been driven by a remarkable process known as cosmic inflation — a brief era of exponential expansion that occurred fractions of a second after the beginning of time. The standard explanation in most inflation models is that a hypothetical field filled space with a very large vacuum-like energy density. While the field slowly evolved, its energy acted like a repulsive gravitational source, causing spacetime to expand exponentially, exceeding the speed of light. Generally, the particle that manifests the field is called as inflaton. In the end of inflation the field became unstable and decayed to hot plasma of standard model particles that is called as reheating of the universe. This marked the true beginning of the Hot Big Bang phase. Some researchers pr...