This period in the universe's evolution is called the age of re-ionization.Astronomers comb the universe looking for the most far-flung and oldest galaxies to help them understand the properties of the early universe. The Big Bang was not an explosion in space, as the theory's name might suggest. The Big Bang Theory is the leading explanation about how the universe began. Thinking about how it all started is hard to imagine.Everything we can see in our universe today—stars, planets, comets, asteroids—they weren't there at the beginning. According to the Big Bang theory, the universe was born as a very hot, very dense, single point in space.When the universe was very young — something like a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second (whew!)

[Our solar system is estimated to have been born a little after 9 billion years after the Big Bang, making it about 4.6 billion years old. NASA, ESA, D. Coe (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and Space Telescope Science Institute), N. Benitez (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain), T. Broadhurst (University of the Basque Country, Spain), and H. Ford Receive mail from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors? According to current estimates, the sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone, and orbits roughly 25,000 light-years from the galactic core.In the 1960s and 1970s, astronomers began thinking that there might be more mass in the universe than what is visible. Instead, it was the appearance of space everywhere in the universe, researchers have said. The universality of physical laws is one of the underlying principles of the theory of relativity. As new stars were being born and dying, then things like How long did all of this take? It is the idea that the universe began as just a single point, then expanded and stretched to grow as large as it is right now (and it could still be stretching). The cosmological principle states that on large scales the universe is homogeneous and isotropic.

Summing up the big bang theory is a challenge. Please deactivate your ad blocker in order to see our subscription offerThis artist’s impression shows galaxies at a time less than a billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was still partially filled with hydrogen fog that absorbed ultraviolet light.NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al.

The light that was unleashed at this time is detectable today in the form of radiation from the cosmic microwave background.Roughly 400 million years after the Big Bang, the universe began to come out of its dark ages. What's This Big Bang All About? The earliest stages of the big bang focus on a moment in which all the separate forces of the universe were part of a unified force.

The basics of the Big Bang theory are fairly simple. Vera Rubin, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, observed the speeds of stars at various locations in galaxies.In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble made a revolutionary discovery about the universe. Much of this deuterium combined to make helium.About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, matter cooled enough for electrons to combine with nuclei to form neutral atoms. The broadly accepted theory for the origin and evolution of our universe is the Big Bang model, which states that the universe began as an incredibly hot, dense point roughly 13.7 billion years ago.

This phase is known as "recombination," and the absorption of free electrons caused the universe to become transparent. During this burst of expansion, which is known as inflation, the universe grew exponentially and doubled in size at least 90 times.Light chemical elements were created within the first three minutes of the universe's formation.