yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Origins of the Universe 101 | National Geographic


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

  • [Narrator] The universe is everything. From the tiniest particles to the largest galaxies, to the very existence of space, time, and life. But how did it all begin? The origin of the universe is the origin of everything. Multiple scientific theories plus creation myths from around the world have tried to explain its mysterious genesis. However, the most widely accepted explanation is the Big Bang theory.

The Big Bang theory states that the universe began as a hot and infinitely dense point. Only a few millimeters wide, it was similar to a supercharged black hole. About 13.7 billion years ago, this tiny singularity violently exploded. And it is from this explosion, this bang, that all matter, energy, space, and time were created. What happened next were two major stages of the universe's evolution. Called the radiation and matter eras, they're defined by key events that helped shape the universe.

First came the radiation era, named for the dominance of radiation right after the Big Bang. This era is made of smaller stages called epochs that occurred within the universe's first tens of thousands of years. The earliest is the Planck epoch. No matter existed in the universe at this time, only energy and the ancestor to the four forces of nature, the superforce. At the end of this stage, however, a key event occurred in which gravity split away from the superforce.

Next came the grand unification epoch, named for the three remaining unified forces of nature. This epoch ended when one of those forces, called strong or strong nuclear, broke away. Then the inflationary epoch began, during which the universe rapidly expanded. Almost instantly, it grew from the size of an atom to the size of a grapefruit. The universe at this time was piping hot and it churned with electrons, quarks, and other particles.

Then came the electroweak epoch, when the last two forces, electromagnetic and weak, finally split off. During the next stage, the quark epoch, all of the universe's ingredients were present; however, the universe was still too hot and dense for subatomic particles to form. Then, in the hadron epoch, the universe cooled down enough for quarks to bind together and form protons and neutrons.

In the lepton and nuclear epochs, the radiation era's last two stages, the protons and neutrons underwent a significant change. They fused and created nuclei. And in doing so, they created the first chemical element in the universe, helium. The universe's new ability to form elements, the building blocks of matter, queued the matter era. Much as the name suggests, the matter era's defined by the presence and predominance of matter in the universe.

It features three epochs that span billions of years, the vast majority of the universe's lifespan, and includes the present day. The first was the atomic epoch. In this stage, the universe's temperature cooled down enough for electrons to attach to nuclei for the first time. Called recombination, this process helped create the universe's second element, hydrogen. This hydrogen, along with helium atoms, dotted the universe with atomic clouds.

Within the clouds, small pockets of gas may have had enough gravity to cause atoms to collect. These clusters of atoms, formed during the galactic epoch, became the seedlings of galaxies. Nestled inside those galaxies, stars began to form. And in doing so, they queued the latest and current stage of the universe's development, the stellar epoch. The formation of stars then caused a tremendous ripple effect and helped shape the universe as we know it.

Heat within the stars caused the conversion of helium and hydrogen into almost all the remaining elements in the universe. In turn, those elements became the building blocks for planets, moons, life, everything we see today. This ecosystem of everything was only possible because of the many stages in the universe's development. While countless questions about the origins of our universe remain, it's only a matter of time for some long-sought answers to emerge.

More Articles

View All
The english language is a giant meme..
English is a difficult language, but… it can be understood through tough thorough thought, though. We park our cars on a driveway, but we drive cars on a parkway. When you transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when you transport somethin…
Remember These 15 People When You Get Rich
Not everyone in your life is created equal. Some people will come into your life, some will walk away, and some you will never forget. Here are 15 people to remember in your life. Welcome to Alux, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired.…
Ben Silbermann at Startup School SV 2016
Good morning! Nice to see everyone here. Uh, my name is Ali Rani. I’m a partner at Y Combinator. I run our late-stage fund; it’s called the Y Combinator Continuity Fund. I couldn’t be happier to be here today to conduct a fireside chat with Ben Berman, wh…
A capacitor integrates current
So now I have my two capacitor equations; the two forms of the equation. One is I in terms of V, and the other is V in terms of I. We’re going to basically look at this equation here and do a little exercise with it to see how it works. I’m going to draw…
The Market Revolution - part 1
So some historians have actually said that the Market Revolution is more revolutionary than the American Revolution. Actually, this is a very classic AP US History question: which was more revolutionary, the American Revolution or the Market Revolution? …
Analyzing model in vertex form
An object is launched from a platform. Its height in meters, x seconds after the launch, is modeled by h of x is equal to negative 5 times x minus 4 squared plus 180. So normally, when they talk about seconds or time, they usually would use the variable …