Part 1
The purpose of the article is to share with you the discoveries made during the course of a journey that began some 30 years ago.
It is the hope that this article is one of many. Of course, this will depend on the reader’s response and comments. Let’s start our journey of discovery.
For centuries, scientists conceived of an eternal static cosmos, a universe without beginning or end. All this was about to change in the 1920s with the spectacular discovery that galaxies were drifting apart. American astronomer Edwin Hubble and others were measuring the light emitted by galaxies. By capturing the incoming light and passing it through a spectroscope, it became clear that while nearby galaxies were moving toward our Milky Way, distant ones were moving away. By tabulating his data, Hubble came to the startling conclusion that the universe was in a state of violent expansion. This enlargement was not due to galactic motion through existing space, but was the result of stretching of the intervening space that pulled the galaxies apart. This is like blowing up a balloon with corners glued to its surface. The skin of the globe represents the expanding space and the coins the galaxies. As you inflate the balloon, its skin expands and the coins move away from each other. Note that coins, like galaxies, do not expand: it is the skin of the globe (space) that expands.
This observation had profound implications for the nature of our universe. If the galaxies were moving away from each other, they must have been closer in the past. Rewinding the cosmic movie, that is, going back in time, the galaxies should get closer and closer to each other. There must have been a time in the distant past when all the galaxies were on top of each other, a starting point. This was an amazing deduction. Our universe did not exist for all eternity, but came into existence at a definite time in the past: it has a finite history.
The fact that the expanding universe had a starting point led to the formulation of the Big Bang theory, the most widely accepted scientific explanation for the origin and development of the universe. Big Bang cosmology proposes that the universe was born about 13.7 billion years ago from an infinitely hot and infinitely dense dimensionless point, the so-called singularity. The singularity suddenly expanded creating energy, mass, space and time. As the microverse expanded, it cooled. Under the influence temperature decrease, the energy generated by the Big Bang underwent a series of transformations. This led to the formation of particles of matter and force. First, quarks were formed. Quarks, assisted by the newly created forces of nature assembled into protons, neutrons, atoms, and then molecules. Construction of the structure was underway.
Young galaxies appeared 2 billion years after the Big Bang, and modern galaxies began to take shape a few billion years later. Our solar system was born 5 billion years ago and the earth 4.6 billion years ago. In 500 million years life would arise from the earth’s chemicals and it would take another 3.5 billion years for human beings to appear. This, in a nutshell, is the conclusion of modern science, how our universe came to be.
To be continue…