Category: 4. The Big Bang

The universe is not only expanding, but expanding faster. This means that with time, nobody will be able to spot other galaxies from Earth or any other vantage point within our galaxy. “We will see distant galaxies moving away from us, but their speed is increasing with time,” harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb said in…

Although the Big Bang is often described as an “explosion”, that’s a misleading image. In an explosion, fragments are flung out from a central point into a pre-existing space. If you were at the central point, you’d see all the fragments moving away from you at roughly the same speed.  But the Big Bang wasn’t…

While astronomers study the universe’s beginnings through creative measures and mathematical simulations, they’ve also sought proof of its rapid inflation. They have done this by observing gravitational waves, tiny perturbations in space-time that ripple outwards from great disturbances like, for instance, two colliding black holes or the universe’s birth. According to leading theories, in the first…

The CMB has been observed by many researchers now and with many spacecraft missions. One of the most famous space-faring missions to do so was NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which mapped the sky in the 1990s. Several other missions have followed in COBE’s footsteps, such as the BOOMERanG experiment (Balloon Observations of Millimetric…

Because we can’t see it directly, scientists have been trying to figure out how to “see” the Big Bang through other measures. In one case, cosmologists are pressing rewind to reach the first instant after the Big Bang by simulating 4,000 versions of the current universe on a massive supercomputer.  “We are trying to do something like…

The Big Bang Theory explains how the universe began: The Big Bang Theory is the leading explanation for how the universe began. Simply put, it says the universe as we know it started with an infinitely hot and dense single point that inflated and stretched — first at unimaginable speeds, and then at a more measurable rate…