Circa 1980, physicists such as Zel'dovich and Guth and Linde pointed out that the features of the observable universe are not consistent with the Standard Model unless there was an era very early in the history of the universe in which the volume of space completely filled by our universe expanded in an extremely brief interval by a factor of 10⁸⁰ or 10¹⁰⁰ or more! This incredible expansion, called “inflation,” has left many unmistakable traces in the universe today, and was indirectly confirmed by observations of the entire universe at the age of 380,000 years by the WMAP satellite. New observations have recently finished being made at much higher resolution by the PLANCK satellite; the WMAP and PLANCK observations clearly show random quantum fluctuations, 1 part in 10⁴, that were tremendously magnified during the inflation era, to become the seeds of all structure now existing in our universe.  It should also be possible to see the direct signature of inflation in gravitational radiation from that era, imprinted on the 380,000-year-old "first light."

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