The Early Universe is mysterious. What happened in those times, where the Universe was younger than you or me? Find out in this new article. I will explain to you what were the characteristics of the baby universe till around 500 million years after the universe was born. I will also be explaining the Big Bang roughly, as well as how scientists can practically look back in time.
In the beginning, nothing was there. No Earth, no galaxy, no Starbucks. All that we know for sure existed was a tiny miniscule universe that was smaller than an atom. Then, 13 and a half billion years ago, all of a sudden, it exploded. Suddenly, in a trillionth of a second, the universe was a million times larger than it was. It expanded outwards, and it still to this day is expanding. In the span of a second, the universe had grown more than a hundred miles. No complex matter had formed yet.
In the universe’s first minute, it was really hot, much hotter than it is now. So hot that subatomic particles could not form. It was simply a mess of quarks and electrons, the two main subatomic particles. Finally, things cooled down to make protons and neutrons, and then, around ten minutes later, atoms. Since it took this long to make atoms, planets and stars did not follow for a long time. The Milky Way, our galaxy, is about 11 to 12 billion years old.
Scientists can technically look back in time, so envisioning the big bang and the early universe is not that difficult. How? We have learnt at school that light travels 3 x 108 m per second, and it is because of light that we see things. So, since light travels this fast, the time delay on things we see is minimal. But the larger the distance, the more the time delay that occurs to us.
For example, there is a star 50 light years away. Its light is taking 50 years to reach us. The light that we receive from it is 50 years old. So, we are seeing the star as it was 50 years ago. If it exploded today, we would not know for 50 years that it had exploded. With this technique, scientists would be able to look back billions of years ago.
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