For the first time, scientists have reported witnessing gravitational waves that are believed to have come from the Big Bang that created the universe.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the researchers used radio telescopes in the South Pole and say the event is the first bit of solid evidence or the theory of cosmic inflation. Just after the Big Bang, the universe expanded from one atom to 100 trillion times its size faster than the speed of light.

Published in the journal Nature, researchers from Caltech, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford, the University of Minnesota and Harvard collaborated on the project, dubbed the BICEP2 experiment.

"This is really exciting. We have made the first direct image of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time across the primordial sky, and verified a theory about the creation of the whole universe," BICEP2 co-leader Chao-Lin Kuo, an assistant professor of physics at Stanford, said in a news release.

Another co-leader of the project, Jamie Bock, of NASA's JPL, helped build BICEP2's detector technology. He said the team wanted to find solid evidence of the gravitational waves that squeezed and bent space at the time of the universe's birth.

"Small, quantum fluctuations were amplified to enormous sizes by the inflationary expansion of the universe. We know this produces another type of waves called density waves, but we wanted to test if gravitational waves are also produced," he said in a press release.

The project has also affirmed just how small our universe is when compared to the vast expanses of space. The Big Bang would have occurred 13.8 billion years ago and that violent expansion of one atom to something 100 trillion times its size created massive gravitational waves throughout space.

Since that initial growth spurt, the universe would continue to expand, only at a slower pace. This expansion theory came from MIT theoretical physicist Alan Guth in 1980 and, combined with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, helped shaped scientists' view of the early universe.

The new research now gives solid evidence to those theories.

"It's amazing," experimental cosmologist John Carlstrom, of the University of Chicago, told the LAT. "Everyone in my field, what we're thinking of doing in the future, we have to all rethink. This is an amazing milestone."