When an orchestra is just tuning up, disjointed sounds drift through the hall, but as soon as the conductor raises the baton, chaos turns into a symphony. Much the same can be said for the beginning of our Universe. In its first moments, it expanded at an unimaginable speed — faster than light could cross it. This brief event, called inflation, left behind a barely perceptible ripple in the distribution of matter, like the rings on water from a thrown stone. Today, we see this ripple as patches of slightly different temperature on the cosmic microwave background map.
The authors of the new study found a way to reconstruct the very "wave of the conductor's baton" from this ripple: that is, to learn exactly how the Universe expanded. They rewrote the equations that governed the birth of inhomogeneities in a form resembling a wave scattering problem. When you toss pebbles into a pond, you can try to infer the shape of the bottom from the expanding rings. Here, the pebbles are quantum fluctuations (random micro-scale jitters), and the "bottom" is the expansion process itself. The key tool was the Jost function — a mathematical object that, like a sensitive tuning fork, picks up the slightest deviations from a smooth inflationary course.
The method was tested on two textbook examples: a smooth one, like a gentle hill, and a step-like one with a sharp drop. In the first case, the reconstructed picture almost perfectly matched the original. In the second, where the sharp transition generated a strong "echo," small discrepancies appeared, but these very discrepancies revealed the presence of an anomaly. This approach resembles the work of a geologist who uses reflected seismic waves to locate underground faults. They cannot see them directly, but they can precisely determine where and at what depth an inhomogeneity lies.
Now cosmologists have a tool that allows them not just to speculate about the first moments, but to reconstruct them from the observed "imprint." It is as if we had learned to determine the shape of a stone and the force with which it was thrown from the frozen ripples on an ancient lake. And who knows — perhaps in this ripple are hidden clues to the symphony that our Universe performed at its very beginning.
The cosmic microwave background ripple we see today formed when the Universe was just 380 000 years old, like taking a snapshot of a baby a few hours after birth.