Big Bang Theory Facts

The Big Bang explosion is how scientists think the Universe began some 15 billion years ago.
First there was a hot ball tinier than an atom. This cooled to 10 billion billion °C as it grew to football size.
A split second later, a super-force swelled the infant Universe a thousand billion billion billion times. Scientists call this inflation.
As it mushroomed out, the Universe was flooded with energy and matter, and the super-force separated into basic forces such as electricity and gravity.
There were no atoms at first, just tiny particles such as quarks in a dense soup a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times denser than water.
There was also antimatter, the mirror image of matter. Antimatter and matter destroy each other when they meet, so they battled it out. Matter just won – but the Universe was left almost empty.
After three minutes, quarks started to fuse (join) to make the smallest atoms, hydrogen. Then hydrogen gas atoms fused to make helium gas atoms.
After one million years the gases began to curdle into strands with dark holes between them.
After 300 million years, the strands clumped into clouds, and then the clouds clumped together to form stars and galaxies.
The afterglow of the Big Bang can still be detected as microwave background radiation coming from all over space.

This entry is filed under Interesting Facts.