Big Bang: Beginning Of The Cosmos

The Big Bang theory represents cosmologists’ best experiments to reconstruct the 14 billion year story of the galaxy based on the sliver of validity apparent today.

Several people use the term “Big Bang” in different ways. Most generally, it exemplifies the arc of the observable universe as it thinned out and cooled down from an initially dense, hot state. This description boils down to the idea that the cosmos is expanding, a broad principle analogous to the survival of the fittest in biology that few would consider controversial.

More specifically, the Big Bang can also refer to the birth of the observable universe itself — the moment something changed, kickstarting the events that led to today. Cosmologists have argued for decades about the details of that fraction of a second, and the discussion proceeds today.

For most of human history, observers of the sky determined it eternal and unchanging. Edwin Hubble dealt this story an experimental blow in the 1920s when his observations exhibited both that galaxies outside the Milky Way existed, and that their light appeared stretched a sign that they were rushing away from Earth.

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Regardless of its name, the Big Bang theory found extensive acceptance for its unparalleled proficiency to explain what we see. The balance of light with particles like protons and neutrons during the first 3 minutes, for instance, let early elements form at a rate foreseeing the current amounts of helium and other light atoms.

“There was a small window in time where nuclei could form,” said Glennys Farrar, a cosmologist at New York University. “After that, the universe kept expanding and they couldn’t find each other, and before [the window] it was too hot.”

A cloudy plasma filled the macrocosm for the next 378,000 years until further cooling let electrons and protons form neutral hydrogen atoms, and the fog cleared. The light emitted during this process, which has since stretched into microwaves, is the earliest known object researchers can survey directly. Known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, many experimenters contemplate it as the strongest evidence for the Big Bang.

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