Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered how everything came to be?

I’m Guenne Gabriel

C. Patano, your host, and I will be talking about how the universe began.

Since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, the universe has passed through many different phases or
epochs. Because of the Big bang matter, space, energy and time were created. Other scientists also
speculate that Time Zero starts after the Big Bang. Due to the extreme conditions and the violence of its
very early stages, it arguably saw more activity and change during the first second than in all the billions
of years since.

The development of the universe had 2 major stages: the Radiation era and the Matter Era.

The Radiation Era is the first one and named because of the radiation after the big bang. This begins
with the Planck Epoch.

Planck Epoch (or Planck Era), from zero to approximately 10-43 seconds (1 Planck Time):

No matter existed. Only energy and the superforce. This is the closest that current physics can get to
the absolute beginning of time, and very little can be known about this period. General relativity
proposes a gravitational singularity before this time (although even that may break down due to
quantum effects), and it is hypothesized that the four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, weak
nuclear force, strong nuclear force and gravity) all have the same strength, and are possibly even unified
into one fundamental force, held together by a perfect symmetry which some have likened to a
sharpened pencil standing on its point. At this point, the universe spans a region of only 10-35 meters (1
Planck Length), and has a temperature of over 1032°C (the Planck Temperature). At the end of this
stage, gravity split from the superforce.

Grand Unification Epoch, from 10–43 seconds to 10–36 seconds:

Due to the separation of gravity from the superforce, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force and strong
nuclear force remain. The earliest elementary particles (and antiparticles) begin to be created. At the
end of this stage, strong nuclear force split from the remaining forces.

Inflationary Epoch, from 10–36 seconds to 10–32 seconds:

Triggered by the separation of the strong nuclear force, the universe undergoes an extremely rapid
exponential expansion, known as cosmic inflation. The linear dimensions of the early universe
increases during this period of a tiny fraction of a second by a factor of at least 1026 to around 10
centimeters (about the size of a grapefruit). The elementary particles remaining from the Grand
Unification Epoch become distributed very thinly across the universe. The particles at this time were a
hot, dense quark-gluon plasma, sometimes known as “quark soup”.

Electroweak Epoch

This is when the last 2 forces: electromagnetic and weak, split off.

Quark Epoch
All of the universe’s ingredients were present but the universe was too hot and dense for subatomic
particles to form.

Hadron Epoch, from 10–6 seconds to 1 second:

The temperature of the universe cools to about a trillion degrees, cool enough to allow quarks to
combine to form hadrons (like protons and neutrons). Electrons colliding with protons in the extreme
conditions of the Hadron Epoch fuse to form neutrons and give off massless neutrinos, which continue
to travel freely through space today, at or near to the speed of light. Some neutrons and neutrinos re-
combine into new proton-electron pairs. The only rules governing all this apparently random combining
and re-combining are that the overall charge and energy (including mass-energy) be conserved.

Lepton Epoch, from 1 second to 3 minutes:

After the majority (but not all) of hadrons and antihadrons annihilate each other at the end of the
Hadron Epoch, leptons (such as electrons) and antileptons (such as positrons) dominate the mass of the
universe. As electrons and positrons collide and annihilate each other, energy in the form of photons
is freed up, and colliding photons in turn create more electron-positron pairs.

Photon Epoch, from 3 minutes to 20 minutes

During this long period of gradual cooling, the universe is filled with plasma, a hot, opaque soup of
atomic nuclei and electrons. After most of the leptons and antileptons had annihilated each other at the
end of the Lepton Epoch, the energy of the universe is dominated by photons, which continue to
interact frequently with the charged protons, electrons and nuclei.

Nuclear Epoch

The temperature of the universe falls to the point (about a billion degrees) and Nucleosynthesis
happens, where atomic nuclei begin to form as protons and neutrons combine through nuclear fusion
to form the nuclei of the simple element hydrogen.

After about 20 minutes, the temperature and density of the universe has fallen to the point where
nuclear fusion cannot continue.

Matter Era or sometimes called Dark Era, from 300,000 to 150 million years:

This is the period after the formation of the first atoms and before the first stars.

Atomic Epoch

Ionized hydrogen and helium atoms capture electrons (known as “recombination”), thus neutralizing
their electric charge. With the electrons now bound to atoms, the universe finally becomes transparent
to light, making this the earliest epoch observable today. It also releases the photons in the universe
which have up till this time been interacting with electrons and protons in an opaque photon-baryon
fluid (known as “decoupling”), and these photons (the same ones we see in today’s cosmic background
radiation) can now travel freely. Neutral atoms were formed and thus began the formation of helium
and lithium. By the end of this period, the universe consists of a fog of about 75% hydrogen and 25%
helium, with just traces of lithium.

Galactic Epoch

-H and He 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 became the seedlings of galaxies.

Stellar Epoch

-Inside those galaxies, stars begin to form. This is the latest stage of the universe’s development

The star continued to shine till the exhaustion of hydrogen gas. When the hydrogen gas got consumed
completely, the helium was left as the product of reaction. Since the nuclear reactions had stopped, the
gravity started dominating the outward energy pressure and the star started collapsing which increased
pressure and temperature. With the rise in the temperature, the helium started participating in nuclear
reactions to form carbon. When Helium got finished, the carbon started fusion reaction to form heavier
elements like oxygen and silicon. These chain reactions continued till the formation of iron. The iron is
most stable element. After the iron no further nuclear reaction took place in the star and after this, the
star stopped shining.

During the end stages of life, the star with massive size usually exploded in the form of supernova which
resulted in the nebula. The nebula had debris of star which contained these heavier elements like
carbon, oxygen and silicon etc.

This debris acted as raw material for the formation of new stars and planets. The planets formed from
these materials were rich in these heavier elements. That’s why we see abundance of silicon, carbon,
oxygen on the Earth.

The elements heavier than iron require much larger energy. Such a large amount of energy is provided
by the supernova explosions. So elements that are heavier than iron are synthesized in the supernova.

Basically, through the heat of the stars caused the conversion of Hydrogen and Helium into almost all
the remaining elements in the universe. Those elements became the building blocks of everything.
Literally, everything!

And that folks, is how the universe began.