Cosmologists celebrated the new year by launching a new experiment on a balloon in Antarctica to investigate the Big Bang.

A set of six telescopes known as Spider, for Suborbital Polarimeter for Inflation, Dust and the Epoch of Reionization, will circle the continent for the next 20 days, observing a haze of faint microwave radio waves that envelop space and are thought to be the fading remnants of the primordial fireball in which it all started 13.8 billion years ago.

The telescopes, built by an international collaboration led by physicists from Caltech and Princeton, are designed to detect faint curlicues in the polarization of the microwaves. According to a widely held theory known as inflation, such curls would have been caused by violent disruptions of space-time when the universe as we know it began expanding, a sliver of a moment after time as we think we understand it began.

Spider is a sister experiment to another Caltech-based collaboration known as Bicep, whose investigators made headlines last spring when they announced they had recorded the curlicues in one patch of sky from a telescope at the South Pole, confirming inflation. The scientists later had to concede that most or all of their signal could have been caused by interstellar dust.