Amazing Facts About the Early Universe

The universe continues to amaze and perplex astronomers. There are many theories regarding how the universe started but it is widely accepted that it began approximately 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. This phenomenon wasn’t a massive explosion but rather an expansion. Astronomers have spent quite some time trying to understand and learn how the universe expanded. There are some interesting facts they have gathered about the early universe.    \r \r 1. Heat\r \r We complain about hot summer days but that heat is insignificant in comparison to the extreme heat of the early universe. The universe was extraordinarily hot and dense right after the Big Bang. Conditions were ideal for the emergence of the fundamental components of matter, the quarks and electrons from which we are all created, as the universe cooled. According to some calculations, everything was one quadrillion, or 1,000 trillion, degrees Celsius, after the expansion started. That is around 20 billion times hotter than the sun's center. The temperature was calculated using observations of far-off objects and measurements of the cosmic background radiation which is the heat that remained after the Big Bang.\r \r 2. Fog\r \r During the first 300,000 – 400,000 years after the commencement of the Big Bang, the universe comprised its first matter which today we know as fog. This was a massive cloud of hydrogen. At that time, enough cooling had taken place for protons and electrons to combine to create a cloud of neutral hydrogen gas. Astronomers refer to this time as the "Dark Ages." Eventually, gravity caused the first stars and galaxies to form from the condensation of hydrogen clouds.\r \r 3. Echoes From The Big Bang\r \r This massive expansion which we refer to as the Big Bang was not a quiet one. To put it simply, it was like an airbag inflating. This was not a silent process and astrologists have found evidence of this through echoes of the Big Bang. Although these energy echoes have gotten faint over the ages, it was first measured in 2014. It is thought that the ripples of the waves from the bang are approximately 500 million light-years apart and therefore can still be heard. A telescope in the South Pole captured the echoes which scientists describe as ripples in the fabric of space-time.\r \r 4. The First Star\r \r The stars are bodies of great mystery. Of the stars that are being observed, which is the oldest? This star is called AS0039 and is thought to be 290,000 light years away in the Sculptor dwarf spheroidal galaxy. According to scientists, the older a star, the lower its metal content. The oldest stars are called Population III stars and are not usually observed. AS0039 is one of these and has the lowest metal content of any star found outside of our galaxy. These stars are thought to have existed before metal was common in the early universe.\r \r 5. Formation of Life\r \r We continue to question the process of how life began. While all the elements needed to form the first cell were all present in the universe, how did they all come together to create life? This is believed to have occurred 3.5 billion years ago. Benjamin Hess and his colleagues explain that the answer lies in lightning. After the Earth was formed, there were billions of lightning storms in the atmosphere. It is believed that one of the lightning bolts may have hit a body of water where all the chemicals had gathered, releasing phosphorus from the earth and triggering the transformation of free protein into DNA.