Don't worry. I have Ph.D. in Math and half a major in Physics and I read cryptic papers for living and I barely can understand the article.

In particular, I'm not involved in cosmology or string theory, so take all the following explanation as a educated guess ...

> ...What? Double the size every tick? As in... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64?

It's only a "friendly" way to say "exponentially", or in other words, it's only a "confusing" way to say "exponentially". There is no discrete interval clicks of a magic clock, only continuous exponential grow.

In the early moments of the universe, there was an inflation period. The universe grew very very very exponentially fast, and it became very uniform. They suspect that the small quantum fluctuations during/just-before this period caused small uniformities in the universe.

After all this time, the uniformities created the galaxies and/or clusters of galaxies. So if they measure the position and size of the galaxies/cluster they can try to classify the quantum fluctuations during the inflation. There is also similar information in the background radiation, so they want to measure it too.

Sometime, a quantum fluctuation form two particles, and one of the particles splits in two particles, so you get tree particles! They call them "triangles", I don't know why. If you assume that the energy and momentum is conserved, then the properties of the particles are related. So you can try to choose all the terns of galaxies/clusters/whatever and select only the ones that have this relation. I guess it's more difficult, because the galaxies collide, and move around other galaxies, and that king of things, so you have to do a lot of calculation, not just take the current position.

So the "triangles" are just three "interesting" features in the space, that follow some rules. Don't expect to see the three points joined by segments :), or the inner part of the triangle painted :) :).

There was a lot of energy around during the inflation period, so they expect to see some strange particles that are predicted by the superstring theory. Actually, there are many variations of the superstring theory, and they whish to eliminate a few using this data. Anyway, they still have to increase the sensibility of the experiment 1000 fold to get something useful, so don't hold tour breath.

The idea is that the properties of the objects in the triangle depend on the properties of the particles of the initial random fluctuation during the inflation. There are a lot or random variables here, so they have to find a lot of triangles and do a lot of statistic. They can predict the distribution of the triangles created by each kind of particle, and them sum with weight each distribution and compare that with what they find in the universe.

In particular, they want to see if all the triangles are explained by elemntary particles of spin 0, 1/2 and 1, or they have to include in their model also particles of spin 3/2, 2, ... Nobody have seen elementary particles of spin 3/2, 2, ... but the string theory predict that the exist. So finding them will give some experimental support for string theory, and perhaps use the details to filter some variations.

You could try to create this elementary particles with spin 3/2, 2, ... in the laboratory, but you need a very big particle accelerator, perhaps bigger than the solar system or the galaxy. So the only hope is to "find" them in some astronomical data.

I just want to repeat that I'm not involved in cosmology or string theory, so take all the explanation as a educated guess ...