Our entire cosmic history is theoretically well-understood, but only because we understand the theory of gravitation that underlies it, and because we know the Universe’s present expansion rate and energy composition. Light will always continue to propagate through this expanding Universe, and we will continue to receive that light arbitrarily far into the future, but it will be limited in time as far as what reaches us. We still have unanswered questions about our cosmic origins, but physics may fundamentally limit what we can know. (NICOLE RAGER FULLER / NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION)

What Really Put The ‘Bang’ In The Big Bang?

Scientists actively researching this have known the answer for quite some time. It’s time for everyone to catch up.

The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago, and is generally regarded as the start of the Universe as we know it. The Universe we see is expanding, cooling, and gravitating into an ever-clumpier state, which means earlier on it must have been denser, hotter, and more uniform.

In the earliest moments that we can imagine, there must have been matter, antimatter, radiation, and any-and-all types of particles that there was enough energy to create. All the matter and energy presently visible in our Universe today was contained in a volume of space no bigger than a city block, and has since expanded to extend for more than 46 billion light-years in all directions.

Still, all of that energy had to come from somewhere, and that’s the big question of what put the “bang” in the Big Bang? Fortunately, science already has given us a tremendously successful answer. It’s time for the rest of the world to learn about it, too.

On a logarithmic scale, the Universe nearby has the solar system and our Milky Way galaxy. But far beyond are all the other galaxies in the Universe, the large-scale cosmic web, and eventually the moments immediately following the Big Bang itself. Although we cannot observe farther than this cosmic horizon which is presently a distance of 46.1 billion light-years away, there will be more Universe to reveal itself to us in the future. The observable Universe contains 2 trillion galaxies today, but as time goes on, more Universe will become observable to us, perhaps revealing some cosmic truths that are obscure to us today. (WIKIPEDIA USER PABLO CARLOS BUDASSI)