The Big Bang Theory

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Many scientists believe that the origin of the universe is from the Big Bang Theory, which was thought to have occurred ~13.9 billion years ago.  Since then, the universe has been continually expanding.




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Key Stages of the Big Bang model.

a. The universe may have begun as an infinitely hot and dense initial singularity, a point with all of space, time, matter and energy. This means that there was no where, when or what. There is no space around the singularity – just nothingness.

b. All of it then began to rapidly expand in a process known as inflation. Space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. In this still hot and dense mass of the universe, pairs of matter and antimatter (quarks and antiquarks) were formed from energy, but these pairs cancelled each other back into energy (annihilation).

c. The universe cooled down as it expanded. An excess of matter (electrons, protons, neutrons and other particles) somehow came to be in a highly energetic “plasma soup.” Photons (light particles) were being scattered everywhere in this “soup”. Protons and neutrons came together to form different types of nuclei by nucleosynthesis or nuclear fusion.

d. Much later on, electrons started to bind to ionized protons and nuclei forming neutral atoms in a process called recombination. The bound particles no longer scattered photons so light and energy moved freely across space. The period was hence known as the “dark ages”.

           e. Gravity caused these atoms to collapse onto one another to form stars and galaxies and eventually, other matter. This still happens until today. Space also continues to expand at an accelerating rate, thus increasing the distance between the matters inside it.