Origin of universe

Origins of the universe, explained

The most popular theory of our universe's origin centers on a cosmic cataclysm unmatched in all of
history—the big bang.

4 MINUTE READ

BY MICHAEL GRESHKO AND NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC STAFF

PUBLISHED JANUARY 18, 2017

The best-supported theory of our universe's origin centers on an event known as the big bang. This
theory was born of the observation that other galaxies are moving away from our own at great speed in
all directions, as if they had all been propelled by an ancient explosive force.

A Belgian priest named Georges Lemaître first suggested the big bang theory in the 1920s, when he
theorized that the universe began from a single primordial atom. The idea received major boosts from
Edwin Hubble's observations that galaxies are speeding away from us in all directions, as well as from
the 1960s discovery of cosmic microwave radiation—interpreted as echoes of the big bang—by Arno
Penzias and Robert Wilson.

Further work has helped clarify the big bang's tempo. Here’s the theory: In the first 10^-43 seconds of its
existence, the universe was very compact, less than a million billion billionth the size of a single atom.
It's thought that at such an incomprehensibly dense, energetic state, the four fundamental forces—
gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces—were forged into a single force, but
our current theories haven't yet figured out how a single, unified force would work. To pull this off, we'd
need to know how gravity works on the subatomic scale, but we currently don't.

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It's also thought that the extremely close quarters allowed the universe's very first particles to mix,
mingle, and settle into roughly the same temperature. Then, in an unimaginably small fraction of a
second, all that matter and energy expanded outward more or less evenly, with tiny variations provided
by fluctuations on the quantum scale. That model of breakneck expansion, called inflation, may explain
why the universe has such an even temperature and distribution of matter.

After inflation, the universe continued to expand but at a much slower rate. It's still unclear what exactly
powered inflation.

Aftermath of cosmic inflation

As time passed and matter cooled, more diverse kinds of particles began to form, and they eventually
condensed into the stars and galaxies of our present universe.

By the time the universe was a billionth of a second old, the universe had cooled down enough for the
four fundamental forces to separate from one another. The universe's fundamental particles also
formed. It was still so hot, though, that these particles hadn't yet assembled into many of the subatomic
particles we have today, such as the proton. As the universe kept expanding, this piping-hot primordial
soup—called the quark-gluon plasma—continued to cool. Some particle colliders, such as CERN's Large
Hadron Collider, are powerful enough to re-create the quark-gluon plasma.

Radiation in the early universe was so intense that colliding photons could form pairs of particles made
of matter and antimatter, which is like regular matter in every way except with the opposite electrical
charge. It's thought that the early universe contained equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But as
the universe cooled, photons no longer packed enough punch to make matter-antimatter pairs. So like
an extreme game of musical chairs, many particles of matter and antimatter paired off and annihilated
one another.
Somehow, some excess matter survived—and it's now the stuff that people, planets, and galaxies are
made of. Our existence is a clear sign that the laws of nature treat matter and antimatter slightly
differently. Researchers have experimentally observed this rule imbalance, called CP violation, in action.
Physicists are still trying to figure out exactly how matter won out in the early universe.

Picture of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63.

Picture of the giant star Zeta Ophiuchi.

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Building atoms

Within the universe's first second, it was cool enough for the remaining matter to coalesce into protons
and neutrons, the familiar particles that make up atoms' nuclei. And after the first three minutes, the
protons and neutrons had assembled into hydrogen and helium nuclei. By mass, hydrogen was 75
percent of the early universe's matter, and helium was 25 percent. The abundance of helium is a key
prediction of big bang theory, and it's been confirmed by scientific observations.

Despite having atomic nuclei, the young universe was still too hot for electrons to settle in around them
to form stable atoms. The universe's matter remained an electrically charged fog that was so dense,
light had a hard time bouncing its way through. It would take another 380,000 years or so for the
universe to cool down enough for neutral atoms to form—a pivotal moment called recombination. The
cooler universe made it transparent for the first time, which let the photons rattling around within it
finally zip through unimpeded.

We still see this primordial afterglow today as cosmic microwave background radiation, which is found
throughout the universe. The radiation is similar to that used to transmit TV signals via antennae. But it
is the oldest radiation known and may hold many secrets about the universe's earliest moments.

From the first stars to today

There wasn't a single star in the universe until about 180 million years after the big bang. It took that
long for gravity to gather clouds of hydrogen and forge them into stars. Many physicists think that vast
clouds of dark matter, a still-unknown material that outweighs visible matter by more than five to one,
provided a gravitational scaffold for the first galaxies and stars.

Once the universe's first stars ignited, the light they unleashed packed enough punch to once again strip
electrons from neutral atoms, a key chapter of the universe called reionization. In February 2018, an
Australian team announced that they may have detected signs of this “cosmic dawn.” By 400 million
years after the big bang, the first galaxies were born. In the billions of years since, stars, galaxies, and
clusters of galaxies have formed and re-formed—eventually yielding our home galaxy, the Milky Way,
and our cosmic home, the solar system.

Even now the universe is expanding, and to astronomers' surprise, the pace of expansion is accelerating.
It's thought that this acceleration is driven by a force that repels gravity called dark energy. We still don't
know what dark energy is, but it’s thought that it makes up 68 percent of the universe's total matter and
energy. Dark matter makes up another 27 percent. In essence, all the matter you've ever seen—from
your first love to the stars overhead—makes up less than five percent of the universe.
COSMOLOGICAL THEORIES THROUGH HISTORY

"Cosmos" is just another word for universe, and "cosmology" is the study of the origin, evolution and
fate of the universe. Some of the best minds in history - both philosophers and scientists - have applied
themselves to an understanding of just what the universe is and where it came from, suggesting in the
process a bewildering variety of theories and ideas, from the Cosmic Egg to the Big Bang and beyond.
Here are some of the main ones, in approximate chronological order:

Brahmanda (Cosmic Egg) Universe - The Hindu Rigveda, written in India around the 15th - 12th Century
B.C., describes a cyclical or oscillating universe in which a “cosmic egg”, or Brahmanda, containing the
whole universe (including the Sun, Moon, planets and all of space) expands out of a single concentrated
point called a Bindu before subsequently collapsing again. The universe cycles infinitely between
expansion and total collapse.

Anaxagorian Universe - The 5th Century B.C. Greek philosopher Anaxagoras believed that the original
state of the cosmos was a primordial mixture of all its ingredients which existed in infinitesimally small
fragments of themselves. This mixture was not entirely uniform, and some ingredients were present in
higher concentrations than others, as well as varying from place to place. At some point in time, this
mixture was set in motion by the action of “nous” (mind), and the whirling motion shifted and separated
out the ingredients, ultimately producing the cosmos of separate material objects, all with different
properties, that we see today.

Atomist Universe - Later in the 5th Century B.C., the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus
founded the school of Atomism, which held that the universe was composed of very small, indivisible
and indestructible building blocks known as atoms (from the Greek “atomos”, meaning “uncuttable”).
All of reality and all the objects in the universe are composed of different arrangements of these eternal
atoms and an infinite void, in which they form different combinations and shapes.

Geocentric universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy - click for larger version

( Click for a larger version)

Geocentric universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy

(Original Source N/A: cartage.org.lb/en/

Aristotelian Universe - The Greek philosopher Aristotle, in the 4th Century B.C., established a geocentric
universe in which the fixed, spherical Earth is at the center, surrounded by concentric celestial spheres
of planets and stars. Although he believed the universe to be finite in size, he stressed that it exists
unchanged and static throughout eternity. Aristotle definitively established the four classical elements
of fire, air, earth and water, which were acted on by two forces, gravity (the tendency of earth and
water to sink) and levity (the tendency of air and fire to rise). He later added a fifth element, aether, to
describe the void that fills the universe above the terrestrial sphere.

Stoic Universe - The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece (3rd Century B.C. and after) believed in a kind
of island universe in which a finite cosmos is surrounded by an infinite void (not dissimilar in principle to
a galaxy). They held that the cosmos is in a constant state of flux, and pulsates in size and periodically
passes through upheavals and conflagrations. In the Stoic view, the universe is like a giant living body,
with its leading part being the stars and the Sun, but in which all parts are interconnected, so that what
happens in one place affects what happens elsewhere. They also held a cyclical view of history, in which
the world was once pure fire and would become fire again (an idea borrowed from Heraclitus).

Heliocentric Universe - The 3rd Century B.C. Greek astronomer and mathematician Aristarchus of Samos
was the first to present an explicit argument for a heliocentric model of the Solar System, placing the
Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the known universe. He described the Earth as rotating daily on its
axis and revolving annually about the Sun in a circular orbit, along with a sphere of fixed stars. His ideas
were generally rejected in favor of the geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy until they were
successfully revived nearly 1800 years later by Copernicus. However, there were exceptions: Seleucus of
Seleucia, who lived about a century after Aristarchus, supported his theories and used the tides to
explain heliocentricity and the influence of the Moon; the Indian astronomer and mathematician
Aryabhata described elliptical orbits around the Sun at the end of the 5th Century A.D.; as did the
Muslim astronomer Ja'far ibn Muhammad Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi in the 9th Century.

Ptolemaic Universe - The 2nd Century A.D. Roman-Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy
(Claudius Ptolemaeus) described a geocentric model largely based on Aristotelian ideas, in which the
planets and the rest of the universe orbit about a stationary Earth in circular epicycles. In terms of
longevity, it was perhaps the most successful cosmological model of all time. Modifications to the basic
Ptolemaic system were suggested by the Islamic Maragha School in the 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries
including the first accurate lunar model by Ibn al-Shatir, and the rejection of a stationary Earth in favor
of a rotating Earth by Ali Qushji.

Abrahamic Universe - Several medieval Christian, Muslim and Jewish scholars put forward the idea of a
universe which was finite in time. In the 6th Century A.D., the Christian philosopher John Philoponus of
Alexandria argued against the ancient Greek notion of an infinite past, and was perhaps the first
commentator to argue that the universe is finite in time and therefore had a beginning. Early Muslim
theologians such as Al-Kindi (9th Century) and Al-Ghazali (11th Century) offered logical arguments
supporting a finite universe, as did the 10th Century Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon.
Partially Heliocentric Universe - In the 15th and early 16th Century, Somayaji Nilakantha of the Kerala
school of astronomy and mathematics in southern India developed a computational system for a
partially heliocentric planetary model in which Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn orbited the
Sun, which in turn orbited the Earth. This was very similar to the Tychonic system proposed by the
Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe later in the 16th Century as a kind of hybrid of the Ptolemaic and
Copernican models.

Heliocentric universe of Copernicus

( Click for a larger version)

Heliocentric universe of Copernicus

(Original Source N/A: cartage.org.lb/en/

themes/sciences/mainpage.htm)

Copernican Universe - In 1543, the Polish astronomer and polymath Nicolaus Copernicus adapted the
geocentric Maragha model of Ibn al-Shatir to meet the requirements of the ancient heliocentric universe
of Aristarchus. His publication of a scientific theory of heliocentrism, demonstrating that the motions of
celestial objects can be explained without putting the Earth at rest in the center of the universe,
stimulated further scientific investigations and became a landmark in the history of modern science,
sometimes known as the Copernican Revolution. His Copernican Principle (that the Earth is not in a
central, specially favored position) and its implication that celestial bodies obey physical laws identical to
those on Earth, first established cosmology as a science rather than a branch of metaphysics. In 1576,
the English astronomer Thomas Digges popularized Copernicus’ ideas and also extended them by
positing the existence of a multitude of stars extending to infinity, rather than just Copernicus’ narrow
band of fixed stars. The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno took the Copernican Principle a stage further
in 1584 by suggesting that even the Solar System is not the center of the universe, but rather a relatively
insignificant star system among an infinite multitude of others. In 1605, Johannes Kepler made further
refinements by finally abandoning the classical assumption of circular orbits in favor of elliptical orbits
which could explain the strange apparent movements of the planets. Galileo's controversial support of
Copernicus' heliocentric model in the early 17th Century was denounced by the Inquisition but
nevertheless helped to popularize the idea.

Cartesian Vortex Universe - In the mid-17th Century, the French philosopher René Descartes outlined a
model of the universe with many of the characteristics of Newton’s later static, infinite universe. But,
according to Descartes, the vacuum of space was not empty at all, but was filled with matter that
swirled around in large and small vortices. His model involved a system of huge swirling whirlpools of
ethereal or fine matter, producing what would later be called gravitational effects.

Static (or Newtonian) Universe - In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his “Principia”, which described,
among other things, a static, steady state, infinite universe which even Einstein, in the early 20th
Century, took as a given (at least until events proved otherwise). In Newton’s universe, matter on the
large scale is uniformly distributed, and the universe is gravitationally balanced but essentially unstable.

Hierarchical Universe and the Nebular Hypothesis - Although still generally based on a Newtonian static
universe, the matter in a hierarchical universe is clustered on even larger scales of hierarchy, and is
endlessly being recycled. It was first proposed in 1734 by the Swedish scientist and philosopher Emanuel
Swedenborg, and developed further (independently) by Thomas Wright (1750), Immanuel Kant (1755)
and Johann Heinrich Lambert (1761), and a similar model was proposed in 1796 by the Frenchman
Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Einsteinian Universe - The model of the universe assumed by Albert Einstein in his groundbreaking
theory of gravity in the early 20th Century was not dissimilar to Newton’s in that it was a static,
dynamically stable universe which was neither expanding or contracting. However, he had to add in a “
cosmological constant” to his general relativity equations to counteract the dynamical effects of gravity
which would otherwise have caused the universe to collapse in on itself (although he later abandoned
that part of his theory when Edwin Hubble definitively showed in 1929 that the universe was not in fact
static).

The Big Bang and the expansion of the universe - click for larger version

( Click for a larger version)

The Big Bang and the expansion of the universe

(Original Source N/A: hetdex.org/dark_energy/)

Big Bang Model of the Universe - After Hubble’s demonstration of the continuously expanding universe
in 1929 (and especially after the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation by Arno Penzias
and Robert Wilson in 1965), some version of the Big Bang theory has generally been the mainstream
scientific view. The theory describes the universe as originating in an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point
(or singularity) between 13 and 14 billion years ago, from where it has been expanding ever since. The
essential statement of the theory is usually attributed to the Belgian Roman Catholic priest and physicist
Georges Lemaître in 1927 (even before Hubble’s corroborating evidence), although a similar theory had
been proposed, although not pursued, 1922 by the Russian Alexander Friedmann in 1922. Friedmann
actually developed two models of an expanding universe based on Einstein’s general relativity
equations, one with positive curvature or spherical space, and one with negative curvature or hyperbolic
space.

Oscillating Universe - This was Einstein’s favored model after he rejected his own original model in the
1930s. The oscillating universe followed from Alexander Friedmann’s model of an expanding universe
based on the general relativity equations for a universe with positive curvature (spherical space), which
results in the universe expanding for a time and then contracting due to the pull of its gravity, in a
perpetual cycle of Big Bang followed by Big Crunch. Time is thus endless and beginningless, and the
beginning-of-time paradox is avoided.
Steady State Universe - This non-standard cosmology (i.e. opposed to the standard Big Bang model) has
occurred in various versions since the Big Bang theory was generally adopted by the scientific
community. A popular variant of the steady state universe was proposed in 1948 by the English
astronomer Fred Hoyle and the and Austrians Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi. It predicted a universe
that expanded but did not change its density, with matter being inserted into the universe as it
expanded in order to maintain a constant density. Despite its drawbacks, this was quite a popular idea
until the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 which supported the Big Bang
model.

Expansion of the observable universe with inflation - click for larger version

( Click for a larger version)

Expansion of the observable universe with inflation

(Source: Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_inflation)

Inflationary (or Inflating) Universe - In 1980, the American physicist Alan Guth proposed a model of the
universe based on the Big Bang, but incorporating a short, early period of exponential cosmic inflation in
order to solve the horizon and flatness problems of the standard Big Bang model. Another variation of
the inflationary universe is the cyclic model developed by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok in 2002 using
state-of-the-art M-theory, superstring theory and brane cosmology, which involves an inflationary
universe expanding and contracting in cycles.

Multiverse - The Russian-American physicist Andrei Linde developed the inflationary universe idea
further in 1983 with his chaotic inflation theory (or eternal inflation), which sees our universe as just one
of many “bubbles” that grew as part of a multiverse owing to a vacuum that had not decayed to its
ground state. The American physicists Hugh Everett III and Bryce DeWitt had initially developed and
popularized their “many worlds” formulation of the multiverse in the 1960s and 1970s. Alternative
versions have also been developed where our observable universe is just one tiny organized part of an
infinitely big cosmos which is largely in a state of chaos, or where our organized universe is just one
temporary episode in an infinite sequence of largely chaotic and unorganized arrangements.
Steady-state theory, in cosmology, a view that the universe is always expanding but maintaining a
constant average density, with matter being continuously created to form new stars and galaxies at the
same rate that old ones become unobservable as a consequence of their increasing distance and
velocity of recession. A steady-state universe has no beginning or end in time, and from any point within
it the view on the grand scale—i.e., the average density and arrangement of galaxies—is the same.
Galaxies of all possible ages are intermingled.

The Andromeda Galaxy, also known as the Andromeda Nebula or M31. It is the closest spiral galaxy to
Earth, at a distance of 2.48 million light-years.

READ MORE ON THIS TOPIC

cosmology: Steady state theory and other alternative cosmologies

Big bang cosmology, augmented by the ideas of inflation, remains the theory of choice among nearly
all…

The theory was first put forward in 1948 by British scientists Sir Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Sir
Fred Hoyle. It was further developed by Hoyle to deal with problems that had arisen in connection with
the alternative big-bang hypothesis. Observations since the 1950s (most notably, those of the cosmic
microwave background) have produced much evidence contradictory to the steady-state picture and
have led scientists to overwhelmingly support the big-bang model.