What is the mystery behind the event that caused the formation of our universe as we know it? Here’s what the experts say.
The Big Bang, the colossal explosion that caused our universe to form, occurred nearly 13.7 billion years ago. After that, it actually took millions of years for the Earth to form. This theory, known as the Big Bang theory, was proposed by an astronomer named Georges Lemaitre in 1927, although there are still unanswered questions today. What were conditions like during the early days of the Big Bang? How did Earth form into the planet as we know it today? What really happened during the Big Bang?
According to the Big Bang theory, the universe began as just a single point, known as the Singularity. The universe stretched and expanded to become as big as it is now, and it’s still expanding a little bit every day. However, this may not be entirely true as this singularity is based on Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, according to space.com.
The technology that caught them all
Understanding all this is not at all possible without the technology and equipment that comes along with it. According to the space agency, NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite and the Wilkinson Anisotropy Microwave Probe reported observations of microwave light just 400,000 years after the Big Bang. NASA says that after the initial explosion, darkness prevailed in the universe for a long time until 100 million years later, when the first appearance of visible and UV light occurred. This light was captured in data form by another of NASA’s wonderful instruments, the Spitzer Space Telescope.
What do the experts say?
Published on space.com, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech said: “The problem is that there is no reason to believe general relativity in that regime. It will be wrong, because it doesn’t take quantum mechanics into account. And quantum mechanics is certainly going to be important once you get to that place in the history of the universe.”
The universe expanded nearly 100 times its size in a fraction of a second, known as Inflation. Alex Filippenko, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley told space.com, “Inflation was the ‘bang’ of the Big Bang. Before inflation, there was just a little bit of stuff, probably expanding just a little bit. We needed something like inflation to make the universe big.”
