And through it all, those photons, left over from the Big Bang and a relic of the end of inflation that started it all, stream through the Universe, continuing to cool but never disappearing. Siegel (corrections)Īs the Universe continues to expand and cool, we create nuclei, neutral atoms, and eventually stars, galaxies, clusters, heavy elements, planets, organic molecules, and life. within it, and all the light, ultimately, to the end of inflation and the beginning of the Hot Big Bang. The cosmic history of the entire known Universe shows that we owe the origin of all the matter.
In energy terms, inflation happens when you roll slowly down a potential, but when finally you roll into the valley below, inflation ends, converting that energy (from being up high) into matter, antimatter and radiation, giving rise to what we know as the hot Big Bang. But the key to understanding where all these particles, antiparticles and radiation first came from? That comes from one simple fact: to get the Universe we had today, inflation had to end. Inflation stretched the Universe flat, it gave it the same conditions everywhere, it drove away any pre-existing particles or antiparticles, and it created the seed fluctuations for overdensities and underdensities in our Universe today. Something needed to happen to set up the initial conditions for the Big Bang, and that “thing” is cosmic inflation, or a period where the energy in the Universe wasn’t dominated by matter (or antimatter) or radiation, but rather by energy inherent to space itself, or an early, super-intense form of dark energy.
#Everything under the sun origin full
By extrapolating backwards from what we have now, we can conclude that within the observable Universe shortly after the Big Bang, there were some 10 89 particle-antiparticle pairs at that time.įor those of you wondering how we’ve got a Universe full of matter (and not antimatter) today, there must have been some process that created slightly more particles than antiparticles (to the tune of about 1-in-1,000,000,000) from an initially symmetric state, resulting in our observable Universe having about 10 80 matter particles and 10 89 photons left over.Īn illustration of how spacetime expands when it’s dominated by Matter, Radiation or energy inherent.
Just like two protons colliding at the LHC can create a plethora of new particles and antiparticles (because they have enough energy), two photons in the early Universe can create anything they posses enough energy to create. These aren’t virtual pairs of matter and antimatter, which populate the vacuum of empty space, but rather real particles. matter-antimatter pairs annihilate to produce photons as well. High-energy collisions of particles can create matter-antimatter pairs or photons, while. After centuries of investigating the origins of the Universe, science has finally uncovered what physically happened to "let there be light" in space. Light, as far as we know it, existed even before that. But even the CMB is relatively late: we're seeing its light from 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Yet there was a time in the distant past before any of those things had formed, just after the Big Bang, where the Universe was still filled with light. If we look in the microwave part of the spectrum, we can find the remnants of this light today in the form of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). When we look out at the Universe today, highlighted against the vast, empty blackness of the sky are points of light: stars, galaxies, nebulae and more. But beyond the last star in the Universe, there's still more light. galaxies, as well as opaque gas and dust, going back as far as we can see. The distant Universe, as viewed here through the plane of the Milky Way, consists of stars and.
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