Editorial

• 来源期刊: 中国科学:物理学 力学 天文学（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2014,（8）
• 页码范围: 1413
• 页数: 1页
• 语种: 中文
• DOI: 10.1007/s11433-014-5522-1

摘要

The past decade has witnessed the birth of the golden age of precision cosmology.In particular,cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements have provided a powerful observational window to probe the earliest epochs of our Universe.Recently (March,2014),the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) telescope at the South Pole announced the first detection of primordial B-mode polarization of the CMB that,if confirmed,provides the first detection of gravitational waves on cosmological scales.Hence,this announcement has become a hot topic in media reports.The BICEP measurement remains controversial in the community,especially since the treatment of the dust foreground is yet to be convincing and the observation used only a single frequency band.However,this result,if confirmed by other independent CMB experiments such as the Planck satellite mission or ground-based telescopes such as Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and South Pole Telescope (SPT),will be able to provide us fingerprints of the baby universe as early as about 10-35 s after the big bang.