The early universe experienced a phase of rapid expansion, known as inflation. For decades, cosmologists assumed that this expansion was powered by a new entity in the universe, known as the inflaton. But new research suggests that it may have been possible to inflate the universe without anything new powering that inflation.
In the 1970s, physicist Alan Guth concocted a radical picture of the extremely early universe. Originally intending to solve some troublesome properties exhibited by the high-energy physics in the young, dense, hot universe, he conceived of a model where a new quantum field, dubbed the inflaton, powered a short-but-intense period of stupendously accelerated expansion, inflating the universe many orders of magnitude in size in less than a second.
