The Big Bang theory explains the creation of the universe from a tiny, super dense, and hot mass that exploded and expanded rapidly. It is supported by evidence such as the cosmic microwave background radiation and the fact that galaxies are receding from each other. The theory was developed by Georges-Henri Lemaître and has been the dominant explanation since the late 1960s. However, there is still much unknown about what happened before 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang.
The Big Bang theory is the best scientific explanation of how the universe was created. The theory states that our entire universe was created when a tiny (billions of times smaller than a proton), super dense, super hot mass exploded and began expanding very rapidly, eventually cooling and forming into stars and clouds. galaxies with which we are familiar. This event is said to have happened about 15 billion years ago. Rather than expanding outward into a pre-existing void, the Big Bang event was the expansion of space itself, possibly at speeds faster than light. (While Einstein’s theory of relativity prohibits anything within space from traveling faster than light, it places no limits on how quickly the fabric of space itself can expand.)
The Big Bang theory was originally developed in the late 1920s by Georges-Henri Lemaître, a Belgian Catholic priest and astronomer who was an early proponent of solutions to general relativity’s field equations that predicted the expansion of our universe. (To be taken seriously, cosmological theories must posit possible solutions to Einstein’s field equations of general relativity.) Although the expanding universe’s solution to the field equations was derived by Russian cosmologist Alexander Friedman in 1922, Lemaître was the first to realize that an ever-expanding universe implies that at some point in the past the universe must have been much denser and smaller, even the size of an atom.
The Big Bang theory is mainly supported by two main lines of evidence: first, the fact that all galaxies are rapidly receding from each other (confirmed by Edwin Hubble in 1929), and second, the presence of the cosmic microwave background radiation, or the “echo” of the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background radiation wasn’t discovered until 1965, and until then, scientists were torn between the Big Bang theory and its rival, Fred Hoyle’s steady-state model, which claimed that the universe was expanding, but remaining essentially the same because new matter was continually being created.
Since the late 1960s, the Big Bang theory has been the dominant explanation for the birth of our universe. Fred Hoyle’s steady state model has been discarded. Most cosmology since then has consisted of modifications and extensions of the Big Bang theory. Since physicists have not yet formulated a coherent theory that explains how gravity operates on extremely small scales (such as those present at the instant of the Big Bang), cosmologists are unable to formulate theories about what happened before about 10^ -43 seconds after the Big Bang. Our universe may have originated as a pointlike entity with nearly infinite density, or perhaps something else entirely. We may need to substantially improve our math, tools, and scientific methodologies before making any further progress.
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