In 2002, Henry Tye and collaborators predicted the production of cosmic superstrings during the last stages of brane inflation, a string theory construction of the early universe that gives leads to an expanding universe and cosmological inflation. It was subsequently realized by string theorist Joseph Polchinski that the expanding Universe could have stretched a "fundamental" string (the sort which superstring theory considers) until it was of intergalactic size. Such a stretched string would exhibit many of the properties of the old "cosmic" string variety, making the older calculations useful again. As theorist Tom Kibble remarks, "string theory cosmologists have discovered cosmic strings lurking everywhere in the undergrowth". Older proposals for detecting cosmic strings could now be used to investigate superstring theory.