The universe began, scientists believe, with every speck of its energy jammed into a very tiny point. This extremely dense point exploded with unimaginable force, creating matter and propelling it outward to make the billions of galaxies of our vast...
February's here and there's so much to cheer. With celebrating the famous Valentine's Day, this month also commemorates the lesser-known "The International Day of the Mother Tongue" on Feb 22. Languages are a beautiful part of our human diaspora. Though diverse in their origins, they play an inherent part in bringing communities together by building bridges of creativity through art and culture.
This month's theme is Big Bang. And this genre's huge and absolutely mind blowing. Join me in this journey of infinite immenseness(if that's a word) and discovery.
The Big Bang explains the beginning of the universe. It propagates a theory that the universe originated as an infinitely hot and dense single point that inflated and stretched-- initially at inconceivable speeds, and then at a steady measurable rate over the next roughly 13.8 billion years to the still-expanding cosmos as it is right now.
Suddenly, an explosive expansion began, ballooning our universe outwards faster than the speed of light. In line with physicist Alan Guth's 1980 theory, this was a period of cosmic inflation that lasted mere fractions of a second — about 10^-32 of a second.
This all happened within just the first second after the universe began, when the temperature of everything was still insanely hot. According to NASA, it was at about 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit/5.5 billion Celsius with the theories of physics stating, if we were to look at the Universe one second after the Big Bang, all we would see would be a 10-billion degree (° K) sea of neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons (positrons), photons, and neutrinos. The cosmos now contained a vast array of fundamental particles--the raw materials that would become the building blocks for everything that exists today.
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The idea of this type of cosmos was put forward by Russian mathematician Aleksandr Friedmann and Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître in the 1920s. Actually in 1927, Georges Lemaître stated that a very long time ago, the universe started as just a single point. He said the universe stretched and expanded to get as big as it is now, and that it could keep on stretching...
The modern version of the Big Bang model was developed by Russian-born American physicist George Gamow and colleagues in the 1940s.
We all know that our current technology is incapable of letting the astronomers have a literal peek at the conception of the universe. So whatever stats we have on the Big Bang, are based on mathematical formulae and models.
The inception of Big Bang was highly impossible to see because it couldn't hold visible light. NASA stated, "the free electrons would have caused light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in clouds." Over a period of time, these free electrons met up with nuclei and created neutral atoms or atoms with equal positive and negative electric charges.
Astronomers can, however, see the "echo" of the expansion through a phenomenon known as the cosmic microwave background(CMB). Referred as the "afterglow" of the Big Bang, this phenomena allowed light to finally shine through around 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
This phenomenon was forecasted by Ralph Alpher and other scientists in 1948 but was found only by accident almost 20 years later—discovered in 1965 by American physicists Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson.
At the same time, a Princeton University team led by Robert Dicke was trying to find evidence of the CMB and realized that Penzias and Wilson had already encountered it with their observations. The two groups published articles simultaneously in the Astrophysical Journal in the same year(1965).
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The CMB has been observed by many researchers now and with many spacecraft missions like the NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite in the 1992 which earned NASA's Dr. John C. Mather and George F. Smoot of the University of California the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics.
This mission followed by the BOOMERanG experiment (Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics), NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the European Space Agency's Planck satellite.
We dive into the fictional anomaly side of Big Bang. The nuclei of my brain insist that I save them from the gravitational pull of chaos before they explode xP
I tried searching for Big Bang stories on Wattpad and the recommendations I got were... the less said, the better. 100% not recommend.
I found some interesting stories on the web. Have a look:
- The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinburg.
- The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe itself by Sean M. Carroll.
- How The Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by Janna Levin.
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
- Black Hole and Time Wraps by Kip S. Thorne.
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
Douglas Adams.
- To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf.
These are all I got. Feel free to drop your favourites in the inlines. I'd love to hear from you 😄
Until we meet the next time, this is me, Nab, signing off. Love you and take care ❤️
