José Jaime Terente Díaz

A stone thrown into a pond creates ripples that spread far. But if you throw it into thick jelly, the waves die out almost immediately. That's roughly how an additional gravity field behaves under different mathematical descriptions. The authors built a unified approach to calculate how such a field manifests itself in the Solar System.

It all started with stretching. In the first fractions of a second, the universe ballooned — physicists call this inflation. Then the rapid expansion gave way to a phase where the field's energy converted into ordinary particles.