Washington (AFP) - Waves of gravity that rippled through space right after the Big Bang have been detected for the first time, in a landmark discovery that adds to our understanding of how the universe was born, US scientists said Monday. The waves were produced in a rapid growth spurt 14 billion years ago, and were predicted in Albert Einstein's nearly century-old theory of general relativity but were never found until now. The first direct evidence of cosmic inflation -- a theory that the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times in barely the blink of an eye -- was announced by experts at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The detection was made with the help of a telescope called BICEP2, stationed at the South Pole, that measures the oldest light in the universe. If confirmed by other experts, some said the work could be a contender for the Nobel Prize. The waves that move through space and time have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang." Their detection confirms an integral connection between Einstein's theory of general relativity and the stranger conceptual realm of quantum mechanics.