Big Bang
Explained... a Cosmological
Theory of the Origin of the Universe... the Big Bang is a unifying theme of cosmology and is based upon EXPANSION, a sort of an burst of space itself that happened everywhere, much like the surface of a balloon expanding - it happens everywhere at once. The Big Bang is a hypothesis 1st proposed by Belgian cosmologist Georges Lemaitre in 1931, with undeniable evidence of the theory with the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 by Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias of Bell Labs . |
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Misconceptions: 1. was not really an "explosion" from a particular location into a preexisting void. 2. model doesn't describe the Big Bang itself, only what happened afterward. 3. Universe was not size of a orange, i.e, energy & heat were just more tightly packed. 4. not everything expands. Gravity overpowers expansion and galaxies remain same size. An analogy: a. You live on the surface of an inflating 2D balloon; with inflation the distance between points is increasing, thus the surface of the balloon is expanding; distance to remote galaxies is increasing, but the galaxies themselves are not expanding, only the space between galaxies is expanding. b. In reverse: any given region of the Universe shrinks and all of the galaxies within it get closer, until they smash together at start of Big Bang age of our Universe. BACK The end of the Big Bang? 2 Age of the Universe... Scientists can guess the universe’s age by using its expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant. The expansion itself is caused by dark energy, and the great proportion of dark energy to matter has resulted in an accelerating expansion rate. Combined with the density of matter, researchers can determine how fast the universe expanded and when that expansion began. To determine the density, composition, and expansion rate of the universe, various missions have measured the residual thermal radiation from the Big Bang, known as cosmic background radiation. These missions performed calculations using those data, and have collaboratively arrived at an age of 13.798 billion years, give or take about 37 million years. Physicists have measured the distortions caused by two orbiting galaxies, and found that the universe is both flat and infinite. Size
of the Universe...
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