Our universe : The beginning

The Big Bang

All around, just blackness, and the out of nowhere, matter emerged. For starters, the big bang was not an explosion, it was just matter and space expanding rapidly. Within fractions of nano seconds, the universe expanded to the size of a football.

In this hot and super dense environment, energy manifested itself into particles that existed for the tiniest glimpses of time. From gluons, that are basically particles that hold sub-atomic particles together, pairs of quarks were formed, which is like the building block of all matter, which broke down forming gluons again. It was so hot that matter and energy were literally the same thing and were equivalent. 

 A few nanoseconds have passed by now and the main force in the universe has broken up into 4 branches with each different consequences , properties and acting upon by different rules. These 4 forces are gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and the strong nuclear forces. I will discuss these in a later blog.

The universe has now stretched to a billion kilo meters in diameter and the temperature decreases. The cycle of quark being made and again broken down into energy stopped suddenly. Now, the quarks make up hadrons, like the proton. Many combination of quarks form many hadrons but only few are reasonably stable. 

By now only one second has passed since the beginning of everything. By now the universe is at about 100 billion kilometers in diameter and is now cold enough to allow neutrons to decay into protons and the first atom of hydrogen is formed.over the next few minutes things cool down rapidly and many atoms of mainly hydrogen are formed. Scientists call this the opaque or dark era as there is not light and hydrogen doesn't visible light to pass through , not like anything can see as nothing was alive.

The big bang resulted in the formation of matter and antimatter. A common question faced by the scientists is where did all the antimatter go as it is found in extremely scarce quantities today. As you may know, when matter meets antimatter it causes an annihilation and destroys each other with the release in energy, this is called annihilation . The most prevalent theory for the missing antimatter is that for every billion particles of antimatter, a billion and one particles of matter is formed, and hence due to annihilation, no antimatter remained.

Over the period of millions of years, the hydrogen atoms under lots of pressure due to gravity, formed stars and galaxies. The radiation of these stars and galaxies dissolved hydrogen gas into a plasma that permeates the universe even today. This allows light to be visible.

We however didn't speak about what triggered this formation of matter from nothing, this part is called the big bang.We have absolutely no idea what happened here. At this point, the natural laws of physics known to humans make no sense and time itself becomes distorted. To understand this, we need a theory that unifies Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, a Grand Unification Theory and scientists are working on this now. 

We have umpteen number of mysteries that we don't understand and humanity has a great journey to continue in the path of science.