This is the story of how it all began, and yet I mean literally everything.
There is a belief that everything that exists was created in a great explosion, and it turns out that this is just a bad joke, made, precisely, by one of the objectors of the theory that concerns us, but that, for those hazards of destiny, and paradoxically, ended up giving the name to the The Big-Bang Theory.
This story begins about 13.7 billion years ago, for sure, it can not be defined with certainty, but various measurements seem to indicate that figure, from the point of view of physics, it is not possible to speak of a before the great explosion, because it would not have a meaning, there is no one before the big explosion, time starts with the big explosion, so to speak of a before, places us in the field of philosophy or metaphysics, rather than the sciences factual
There simply was nothing, no space, no matter, no time, only a singularity, a point of infinite density and mass, which, for reasons still unknown, began a process of expansion, it is not possible to explain why this happened, simply the laws that govern our universe are not applicable to singularities, not even those that exist in our own universe, black holes.
The case is that it did not explode, it expanded, it inflated, as if it were a balloon, it did not expel anything to its outside, because outside of it there was nothing to expel matter, it was and still is a process that takes place inside of the limits of the universe itself. It was not as if that singularity floated in an eternal void, there simply was nothing else apart from the singularity itself, in fact, we are still within the original limits of that singularity, only that its own limits have expanded, its mass remains the same, but its density has diminished at the same time that its volume grows more and more.
Perhaps in the only thing, that the processes that in this expansion and inflation resemble an explosion, is in the violence and speed that occurred, which in reality would embarrass any explosion known by man.
The initial events of our history happened so quickly, that it is necessary to resort a new unit of time to be able to explain them, the Plank’s Time, which is equivalent to the time it takes a photon, to travel a distance that is also called Plank’s Length, which is predicted to be the smallest length at which space has a classical geometry, at shorter lengths, the laws of physics lose meaning, as quantum gravity begins to take effect . The Plank’s Time or Cronón, is equivalent to 10E-43 seconds, and the first Plank Time of the universe is called Plank’s Age.
During the Plank’s Age, when the expansion of the universe begins, the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism and weak and strong nuclear forces) have not yet been differentiated, nor have elementary particles been formed , space and time were part of a singularity of infinitely large mass concentrated in an infinitely small space, an incomprehensible singularity; time begins after the Plank’s Age, before it, it makes no sense to think about time, since nothing less than Plank’s Time can be measured.
At the end of the Plank Age, the universe was about the size of an atomic nucleus size, something like 10E-20 times smaller, Gravity was the first of the four fundamental forces to differentiate, the universe was formed by a quantum vacuum, an emptiness full of energy, in which pairs of particles and virtual antiparticles appeared and disappeared, matter was not yet created.
At 10E-35 seconds inflation begins, the Inflation Age, the universe begins to grow, during inflation its size increases 10E50 times the original, a huge amount, especially if we consider that during the period after 300,000 years after the Big-Bang, up to the present 13,700 million years, has only increased a thousand times its size; during inflation, along with the increase in size, its temperature will decrease significantly until 10E28 ° K.
The beginning of the Inflation Age was favored by the differentiation of the strong nuclear force and the electroweak interaction, this dissociation of forces, generated an immense density of energy scattered throughout the universe, which caused a great expansion force, causing the process inflationary
In this period of immense growth, it is space that grows, the gap between particular increases, at speeds higher than that of light, however, the particles themselves continue to move at speeds lower than this, even here, in the Vortex of the nascent universe, the limits of the theory of relativity are maintained.
At the end of inflation, about 10E-32 seconds after the Big-Bang, begins the formation of matter and antimatter, from the quantum vacuum, particles and virtual antiparticles that previously emerged from the quantum vacuum, take advantage of the energy created by the separation of the strong force and the electroweak interaction, to become real particles of matter, thus arises the matter and antimatter.
It is here that our nascent universe faces its second major test, the particles of matter and antimatter annihilate each other, releasing energy and photons, so in theory all the particles and antiparticles generated should have annihilated each other and our universe would only be formed by photons, however, there must have been some kind of asymmetry between the amount of matter and antimatter, which ended up favoring matter, which allowed the existence of the universe we know, it is still unknown how this asymmetry occurred.
The proliferation of matter continued along with a slower expansion of the universe, until about 10E-12 seconds after the Big-Bang, the temperature had dropped below 10E15 ° K, at this temperature, the electroweak interaction was dissociated, giving rise to the last two fundamental forces, the electromagnetic and the weak nuclear force.
Up to the millionth of a second after the Big-Bang, the elementary particles leptons and quarks, were dissociated, forming what has been called a soup of quarks, it is at this point where the temperature has descended below 10E13 ° K, thus allowing the action of the strong nuclear force, making viable the association of quarks, forming hadrons, the first complex particles, predominantly the association of three quarks, called baryons, which highlights the two that will then shape the material we know, the protons and neutrons. During this period, called Hadrons Age, there is the annihilation of the baryons and anti baryons, where the asymmetry between both, contributes to the predominance of protons and neutrons over their antiparticles.
When the universe has reached ten thousandth of a second, photons have reduced their amount of energy, and the production of pairs of electrons and positrons begins, this is the so-called Leptons Age, during which a process similar to that of the Hadrons Age, but in it, pairs of electrons and positrons are formed and annihilated, again the predominance will be of the electrons. But a good part of these primordial electrons will combine with the neutrons to form protons, leaving the matter dominated by the protons.
With a hundred seconds, the temperature drops below one billion degrees, then when the strong nuclear force, protons and neutrons begin to combine giving rise to the first stable atomic nuclei of deuterium, helium, 3 and helium-4; before this moment the photons were too energetic and their impacts broke any nucleus that was formed.
Thus the atomic nuclei that form our universe are formed, due to the combination of the primordial electrons with the neutrons to form protons, there is a predominance of hydrogen with only one proton in its nucleus, on the helium-4, with two protons and two neutrons, to give a ratio of three to one atoms, in favor of hydrogen, so the universe would be formed, initially, by 75% hydrogen and 25% helium. The period in which the first nuclei were formed is called Radiation Age.
When the temperature drops below 3000 ° K, the electrons, which previously could not be combined with the protons to form atoms, because if they did, the union was broken by the photons, they begin to combine with the nuclei of hydrogen and helium ; because under this temperature, the energy of the photons is low enough to allow the formation of atoms, this is when the matter becomes transparent to the photons, which can now move freely, at this point it is said that the radiation uncoupling of matter, this whole process occurs 380,000 years after the Big-Bang,
This decoupling left its mark on the radioelectric spectrum, the oldest record of the primordial universe, the oldest test of the Big-bang, the microwave background radiation. It can be said that it is the fossil record of the birth of our universe.
After the formation of hydrogen and helium, the gas clouds were condensed by the effect of gravity, giving rise to the first stars about 100 or 400 million years after the Big-Bang, forming the first stellar clusters, and then galaxies. These first stars gave rise to heavier elements such as beryllium, oxygen and carbon. Their deaths gave rise to even heavier elements such as iron, calcium and aluminum, which originated during their explosions in the form of supernovas, and then, from the clouds of gas produced by these explosions, which contained these elements, formed new stars, with planetary systems like ours. Our sun, is a Population I star, this means that it originated from the remains of other stars that lived and died before it was born, and we are formed from the atoms forged in those stars.
Today more than 13,000 million years later, the universe continues to expand, the empty space between particles, between galaxies, a product of dark energy or vacuum energy, which constitutes 70% of the energy content of the universe, continues to grow. the baryonic matter of which everything we can see and perceive is made, makes up only 5% of our universe, the other 25% is made up of dark matter, a type of matter that can not be directly perceived, but which, by different means, we know that it is there, and whose origin and nature we still do not know.
This accelerated expansion can last forever moving away more and more the components of the universe, ending up tearing or can be reduced and the universe end up having a prolonged agony, victim of thermal death, or it may end up stopping and reversing causing everything to end collapsing on itself, this will be determined by the amount of dark energy, but that will be the reason for another publication.
Well with this concludes this story, I hope it has been to your liking, I am attentive to your comments and beforehand I appreciate your votes, until the next post.
Sources
Wikipedia. Big Bang, Wikipedia
Wikipedia. Inflación cósmica, Wikipedia
Wikipedia. Radiación de fondo de microondas, Wikipedia.