The galaxy cluster Abell 370, shown here, was one of the six massive galaxy clusters imaged in the Hubble Frontier Fields program. Since other great observatories were also used to image this region of sky, thousands of ultra-distant galaxies were revealed. By observing them again with a new scientific goal, Hubble’s BUFFALO (Beyond Ultra-deep Frontier Fields And Legacy Observations) program will obtain distances to these galaxies, enabling us to better understand how galaxies formed, evolved, and grew up in our Universe. (Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Koekemoer (STScI), M. Jauzac (Durham University), C. Steinhardt (Niels Bohr Institute), and the BUFFALO team)

10 surprising facts about the Big Bang Theory

It’s the origin of our entire observable Universe, but it’s still not the very beginning of everything.

If you ask a scientist where the Universe got its start, “the Big Bang” is the answer you’re most likely to get. Our Universe full of stars, galaxies and a cosmic web of large-scale structure, all separated by the vastness of empty space between them, wasn’t born that way and hasn’t existed in this form forever. Instead, the Universe came to be this way because it expanded and cooled from a hot, dense, uniform, matter-and-radiation-filled state with no galaxies, stars, or even atoms present at the start.

Everything, as it exists in its current form, wasn’t the way it is today back some 13.8 billion years ago. Moreover, all of that history was figured out only during the past 100 years. But even with all this, there are a whole slew of facts most people — even many scientists — don’t quite get about it.

Here are our top 10 facts about the Big Bang!

The results of the 1919 Eddington expedition showed, conclusively, that the General Theory of Relativity described the bending of starlight around massive objects, overthrowing the Newtonian picture. This was the first observational confirmation of Einstein’s theory of gravity. (Credit: London Illustrated News, 1919)

1.) Einstein first dismissed it outright when it was presented to him as…