The universe appears to have an infinite number of galaxies and solar systems, and our solar system occupies a small section of this vast entity. The origin of the universe sets the context for conceptualizing the solar system's origin and early history. The prevailing idea about how the universe was created is called the big bang theory. It proposes that the universe began 13.77 billion years ago when energy, matter, and space expanded from a single point. Although the ideas behind the big-bang theory feel almost mystical, they are supported by Einstein’s theory of general relativity and empirical scientific evidence such as the cosmic “afterglow" and red-shifted light from distant galaxies, the latter of which tell us the universe is still expanding.

2.1.1 Overview of the Big Bang

According to the big bang theory, the universe blinked violently into existence 13.77 billion years ago. The big bang is often described as an explosion, but imagining it as an enormous fireball isn’t accurate. The big bang involved a sudden expansion of matter, energy, and space from a single point. The kind of Hollywood explosion that might come to mind involves expansion of matter and energy within space, but during the big bang, space itself was created.

At the start of the big bang, the universe was too hot and dense to be anything but a sizzle of particles smaller than atoms, but as it expanded, it also cooled. Eventually some of the particles collided and stuck together. Those collisions produced the simplest elements, hydrogen and helium, which are also the most common elements in the universe, along with a small amount of lithium. Today, hydrogen is still the most abundant element in the universe with its simple structure of just one proton and one electron.

You may wonder how a universe can be created out of nothing or how we can know that the big bang happened at all. Creating a universe out of nothing is mostly beyond the scope of this chapter, but there is a way to think about it. The particles that make up the universe have opposites that cancel each other out, similar to the way that we can add the numbers 1 and −1 to get zero (also known as “nothing”). As far as the math goes, having zero is exactly the same as having a 1 and a −1. It is also exactly the same as having a 2 and a −2, a 3 and a −3, two −1s and a 2, and so on. In other words, nothing is really the potential for something if you divide it into its opposite parts. As for how we can know that the big bang happened at all, there are very good reasons to accept that it is indeed how our universe came to be.

2.1.2 Looking Back to the Early Stages of the Big Bang

The notion of seeing the past is often used metaphorically when we talk about ancient events, but in this case, it is meant literally. In our everyday experience, when we watch an event take place, we perceive that we are watching it as it unfolds in real time. In fact, this isn’t true. To see the event, light from that event must travel to our eyes. Light travels very rapidly, but it does not travel instantly. If we were watching a digital clock one meter away from us change from 11:59 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., we would actually see it turn to 12:00 p.m. three billionths of a second after it happened. This isn’t enough of a delay to cause us to be late for an appointment, but the universe is a very big place, and the “digital clock” in question is often much, much farther away. Remember, the universe is so big that it is convenient to describe distances in terms of light years, or the distance light travels in one year. What this means is that light from distant objects takes so long to get to us that we see those objects as they were at some considerable time in the past. For example, the star Proxima Centauri is 4.24 light years from the sun. If you viewed Proxima Centauri from Earth on January 1, 2015, you would actually see it as it appeared in early October 2010.

We now have tools that are powerful enough to look deep into space and see the arrival of light from early in the universe’s history. Astronomers can detect light from approximately 375,000 years after the big bang is thought to have occurred. Physicists tell us that, if the big bang happened, then particles within the universe would still be very close together at this time. They would be so close that light wouldn’t be able to travel far without bumping into another particle and getting scattered in another direction. The effect would fill the sky with glowing fog, the “afterglow” from the formation of the universe.

In fact, this is exactly what we see when we look at light from 375,000 years after the big bang. The fog is referred to as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and it has been carefully mapped throughout the sky. The map displays the cosmic microwave background as temperature variations, but these variations translate to differences in the density of matter in the early universe. The red patches are the highest density regions, and the blue patches are the lowest density. Higher-density regions represent the eventual beginnings of stars and planets. The map has been likened to a baby picture of the universe.

2.1.3 The Big Bang is Still Happening, and We Can See the Universe Expanding

The expansion that started with the big bang never stopped. It continues today, and through observation, we can see galaxies moving away from us (the only exception is the Andromeda galaxy, with which we are on a collision course). The astronomer Edwin Hubble came to this conclusion when he observed that the light from other galaxies was red-shifted. The red shift is a consequence of the Doppler effect. This refers to how we see waves when the object that is creating the waves is moving toward us or away from us.

Before we get to the Doppler effect as it pertains to the red shift, let’s see how it works on something more tangible. The swimming duckling is generating waves as it moves through the water. It is generating waves that move forward as well as back, but notice that the ripples ahead of the duckling are closer to each other than the ripples behind the duckling. The distance from one ripple to the next is called the wavelength. The wavelength is shorter in the direction that the duckling is moving and longer as the duckling moves away.

As it pertains to air traveling in sound waves, the different wavelengths manifest as sounds with different pitches—the short wavelengths have a higher pitch, and the long wavelengths have a lower pitch. This is why the pitch of a car’s engine changes as the car races past you.

For light waves, wavelength translates to color (Figure 2.4). In the spectrum of light that we can see, shorter wavelengths are on the blue end of the spectrum, and longer wavelengths are on the red end of the spectrum. Does this mean that galaxies look red because they are moving away from us? No, but the color we see is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum and longer wavelengths.

Notice that the sun’s spectrum in the upper part of Figure 2.4 has some black lines in it. The black lines are there because some colors are missing in the light we get from the Sun. Different elements absorb light of specific wavelengths, and many of the black lines in Figure 2.4 represent colors that are absorbed by hydrogen and helium within the Sun. This means the black lines are like a bar code that can tell us what a star is made of. The lower spectrum in Figure 2.4 is the light coming from BAS11, an enormous cluster of approximately 10,000 galaxies located 1 billion light years away. The black lines represent the same elements as in the Sun’s spectrum, but they are shifted to the right toward the red end of the spectrum because BAS11 is moving away from us as the universe continues to expand. So to summarize, because almost all of the galaxies we can see have light that is red-shifted, it means they are all moving away from us. In fact, the farther away they are, the faster they are going. This is evidence that the universe is still expanding.

2.1.4 The Expanding Universe

Let’s now use the results about the expansion of the universe to look at how these ideas might be applied to develop a model for the evolution of the universe as a whole. With this model, astronomers can make predictions about how the universe has evolved so far and what will happen to it in the future.

Every model of the universe must include the expansion we observe. Another key element of the models is that the cosmological principle is valid: on the large scale, the universe at any given time is the same everywhere (homogeneous and isotropic). As a result, the expansion rate must be the same everywhere during any epoch of cosmic time. If so, we don’t need to think about the entire universe when we think about the expansion, we can just look at any sufficiently large portion of it. (Some models for dark energy would allow the expansion rate to be different in different directions, and scientists are designing experiments to test this idea. However, until such evidence is found, we will assume that the cosmological principle applies throughout the universe.)

When we think of the expansion of the universe, it is more correct to think of space itself stretching rather than of galaxies moving through static space. Nevertheless, we have since been discussing the redshifts of galaxies as if they resulted from the motion of the galaxies themselves. However, it is time to finally put such simplistic notions behind us and take a more sophisticated look at the cosmic expansion.

Based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, space—or, more precisely, spacetime—is not a mere backdrop to the action of the universe, as Newton thought. Rather, it is an active participant—affected by and in turn affecting the matter and energy in the universe.

Since the expansion of the universe is the stretching of all spacetime, all points in the universe are stretching together. An analogy for this stretching would be Thus, the expansion began everywhere at once. Unfortunately for tourist agencies of the future, there is no location you can visit where the stretching of space began or where we can say that the Big Bang happened.

To describe just how space stretches, we say the cosmic expansion causes the universe to undergo a uniform change in scale over time. By scale we mean, for example, the distance between two clusters of galaxies. It is customary to represent the scale by the factor R; if R doubles, then the distance between the clusters has doubled. Since the universe is expanding at the same rate everywhere, the change in R tells us how much it has expanded (or contracted) at any given time. For a static universe, R would be constant as time passes. In an expanding universe, R increases with time.

If it is space that is stretching rather than galaxies moving through space, then why do the galaxies show redshifts in their spectra? When you were young and naïve—a few chapters ago—it was fine to discuss the redshifts of distant galaxies as if they resulted from their motion away from us. But now that you are an older and wiser student of cosmology, this view will simply not do.

A more accurate view of the redshifts of galaxies is that the light waves are stretched by the stretching of the space they travel through. Think about the light from a remote galaxy. As it moves away from its source, the light has to travel through space. If space is stretching during all the time the light is traveling, the light waves will be stretched as well. A redshift is a stretching of waves—the wavelength of each wave increases (Figure 2.5). Light from more distant galaxies travels for more time than light from closer ones. This means that the light has stretched more than light from closer ones and thus shows a greater redshift. Thus, what the measured redshift of light from an object is telling us is how much the universe has expanded since the light left the object. If the universe has expanded by a factor of 2, then the wavelength of the light (and all electromagnetic waves from the same source) will have doubled.

2.1.5 The Beginning of the Universe

The best evidence we have today indicates that the first galaxies did not begin to form until a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. What were things like before there were galaxies and space had not yet stretched very significantly? Amazingly, scientists have been able to calculate in some detail what was happening in the universe in the first few minutes after the Big Bang.

Let’s start with the first few minutes following the Big Bang. Three basic ideas hold the key to tracing the changes that occurred during the time just after the universe began. The first is that the universe cools as it expands. Figure 2.6 shows how the temperature changes with the passage of time. Note that a huge span of time, from a tiny fraction of a second to billions of years, is summarized in this diagram. In the first fraction of a second, the universe was unimaginably hot. By the time 0.01 second had elapsed, the temperature had dropped to 100 billion (10¹¹) K. After about 3 minutes, it had fallen to about 1 billion (10⁹) K, still some 70 times hotter than the interior of the Sun. After a few hundred thousand years, the temperature was down to a mere 3000 K, and the universe has continued to cool since that time.

All of these temperatures but the last are derived from theoretical calculations since (obviously) no one was there to measure them directly. However, we have actually detected the feeble glow of radiation emitted at a time when the universe was a few hundred thousand years old; this is the cosmic microwave  background, or cosmic "afterglow!" As we mentioned earlier, we can measure the characteristics of that radiation to learn what things were like long ago.

The second step in understanding the evolution of the universe is to realize that at very early times, it was so hot that it contained mostly radiation (and not the matter that we see today). The photons that filled the universe could collide and produce material particles; that is, under the conditions just after the Big Bang, energy could turn into matter (and matter could turn into energy). We can calculate how much mass is produced from a given amount of energy by using Einstein’s formula [latex]E=mc_{2}[/latex].

The idea that energy could turn into matter in the universe at large is a new one for many students, since it is not part of our everyday experience. That’s because, when we compare the universe today to what it was like right after the Big Bang, we live in cold, hard times. The photons in the universe today typically have far-less energy than the amount required to make new matter. When subatomic particles of matter and antimatter collide, they turn into pure energy. But the reverse, energy turning into matter and antimatter, is equally possible. This process has been observed in particle accelerators around the world. If we have enough energy, under the right circumstances, new particles of matter (and antimatter) are indeed created —and the conditions were right during the first few minutes after the expansion of the universe began.

Our third key point is that the hotter the universe was, the more energetic were the photons available to make matter and antimatter. To take a specific example, at a temperature of 6 billion (6 × 10⁹) K, the collision of two typical photons can create an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron. If the temperature exceeds 10¹⁴ K, much more massive protons and antiprotons can be created.

The Evolution of the Early Universe

Keeping these three ideas in mind, we can trace the evolution of the universe from the time it was about 0.01 second old and had a temperature of about 100 billion K. Why not begin at the very beginning? There are as yet no theories that allow us penetrate to a time before about 10^–43 second (this number is a decimal point followed by 42 zeros and then a one). It is so small that we cannot relate it to anything in our everyday experience. When the universe was that young, its density was so high that the general theory of relativity is not adequate to describe it, and even the concept of time breaks down.

Scientists, by the way, have been somewhat more successful in describing the universe when it was older than 10^–43 second but still less than about 0.01 second old, but for now, we want to start with somewhat more familiar situations.

By the time the universe was 0.01 second old, it consisted of a soup of matter and radiation; the matter included protons and neutrons, leftovers from an even younger and hotter universe. Each particle collided rapidly with other particles. The temperature was no longer high enough to allow colliding photons to produce neutrons or protons, but it was sufficient for the production of electrons and positrons (Figure 2.7). There was probably also a sea of exotic subatomic particles that would later play a role as dark matter. All the particles jiggled about on their own; it was still much too hot for protons and neutrons to combine to form the nuclei of atoms.

Think of the universe at this time as a seething cauldron, with photons colliding and interchanging energy, and sometimes being destroyed to create a pair of particles. The particles also collided with one another. Frequently, a matter particle and an antimatter particle met and turned each other into a burst of gamma-ray radiation.

Atomic Nuclei Form

When the universe was about 3 minutes old and its temperature was down to about 900 million K, protons and neutrons could combine. At higher temperatures, these atomic nuclei had immediately been blasted apart by interactions with high-energy photons and thus could not survive. But at the temperatures and densities reached between 3 and 4 minutes after the beginning, deuterium (a proton and neutron) lasted long enough that collisions could convert some of it into helium through the process of fusion (Figure 2.7). In essence, the entire universe was acting the way centers of stars do today—fusing new elements from simpler components. In addition, a little bit of element 3, lithium, could also form.

This burst of cosmic fusion was only a brief interlude, however. By 4 minutes after the Big Bang, more helium was having trouble forming. The universe was still expanding and cooling down. After the formation of helium and some lithium, the temperature had dropped so low that the fusion of helium nuclei into still-heavier elements could not occur. No elements beyond lithium could form in the first few minutes. That 4-minute period was the end of the time when the entire universe was a fusion factory. In the cool universe we know today, the fusion of new elements is limited to the centers of stars and the explosions of supernovae.

Still, the fact that the Big Bang model allows the creation of a good deal of helium is the answer to a long-standing mystery in astronomy. Put simply, there is just too much helium in the universe to be explained by what happens inside stars. All the generations of stars that have produced helium since the Big Bang cannot account for the quantity of helium we observe. Furthermore, even the oldest stars and the most distant galaxies show significant amounts of helium. These observations find a natural explanation in the synthesis of helium by the Big Bang itself during the first few minutes of time. We estimate that 10 times more helium was manufactured in the first 4 minutes of the universe than in all the generations of stars during the succeeding 10 to 15 billion years.

2.1.6 The Cosmic Microwave Background

The Universe Becomes Transparent

The fusion of helium and lithium was completed when the universe was about 4 minutes old. The universe then continued to resemble the interior of a star in some ways for a few hundred thousand years more. It remained hot and opaque, with radiation being scattered from one particle to another. It was still too hot for electrons to “settle down” and become associated with a particular nucleus; such free electrons are especially effective at scattering photons, thus ensuring that no radiation ever got very far in the early universe without having its path changed. In a way, the universe was like an enormous crowd right after a popular concert; if you get separated from a friend, even if he is wearing a flashing button, it is impossible to see through the dense crowd to spot him. Only after the crowd clears is there a path for the light from his button to reach you.

Not until a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, when the temperature had dropped to about 3000 K and the density of atomic nuclei to about 1000 per cubic centimeter, did the electrons and nuclei manage to combine to form stable atoms of hydrogen and helium (Figure 2.7). With no free electrons to scatter photons, the universe became transparent for the first time in cosmic history. From this point on, matter and radiation interacted much less frequently; we say that they decoupled from each other and evolved separately. Suddenly, electromagnetic radiation could really travel, and it has been traveling through the universe ever since.

Discovery of the Cosmic Background Radiation

If the model of the universe described in the previous section is correct, then—as we look far outward in the universe and thus far back in time—the first “afterglow” of the hot, early universe should still be detectable. Observations of it would be very strong evidence that our theoretical calculations about how the universe evolved are correct. As we shall see, we have indeed detected the radiation emitted at this photon decoupling time, when radiation began to stream freely through the universe without interacting with matter (Figure 2.8).

The detection of this afterglow was initially an accident. In the late 1940s, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, working with George Gamow, realized that just before the universe became transparent, it must have been radiating like a blackbody at a temperature of about 3000 K—the temperature at which hydrogen atoms could begin to form. If we could have seen that radiation just after neutral atoms formed, it would have resembled radiation from a reddish star. It was as if a giant fireball filled the whole universe.

But that was nearly 14 billion years ago, and, in the meantime, the scale of the universe has increased a thousand fold. This expansion has increased the wavelength of the radiation by a factor of 1000 (see Figure 2.5). According to Wien’s law, which relates wavelength and temperature, the expansion has correspondingly lowered the temperature by a factor of 1000. The cosmic background behaves like a blackbody and should therefore have a spectrum that obeys Wien’s Law.

Alpher and Herman predicted that the glow from the fireball should now be at radio wavelengths and should resemble the radiation from a blackbody at a temperature only a few degrees above absolute zero. Since the fireball was everywhere throughout the universe, the radiation left over from it should also be everywhere. If our eyes were sensitive to radio wavelengths, the whole sky would appear to glow very faintly. However, our eyes can’t see at these wavelengths, and at the time Alpher and Herman made their prediction, there were no instruments that could detect the glow. Over the years, their prediction was forgotten.

In the mid-1960s, in Holmdel, New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of AT&T’s Bell Laboratories had built a delicate microwave antenna to measure astronomical sources, including supernova remnants like Cassiopeia A. They were plagued with some unexpected background noise, just like faint static on a radio, which they could not get rid of. The puzzling thing about this radiation was that it seemed to be coming from all directions at once. This is very unusual in astronomy: after all, most radiation has a specific direction where it is strongest—the direction of the Sun, or a supernova remnant, or the disk of the Milky Way, for example.

Penzias and Wilson at first thought that any radiation appearing to come from all directions must originate from inside their telescope, so they took everything apart to look for the source of the noise. They even found that some pigeons had roosted inside the big horn-shaped antenna and had left (as Penzias delicately put it) “a layer of white, sticky, dielectric substance coating the inside of the antenna.” However, nothing the scientists did could reduce the background radiation to zero, and they reluctantly came to accept that it must be real, and it must be coming from space.

Penzias and Wilson were not cosmologists, but as they began to discuss their puzzling discovery with other scientists, they were quickly put in touch with a group of astronomers and physicists at Princeton University (a short drive away). These astronomers had—as it happened—been redoing the calculations of Alpher and Herman from the 1940s and also realized that the radiation from the decoupling time should be detectable as a faint afterglow of radio waves. The different calculations of what the observed temperature would be for this cosmic microwave background (CMB) were uncertain, but all predicted less than 40 K.

Penzias and Wilson found the distribution of intensity at different radio wavelengths to correspond to a temperature of 3.5 K. This is very cold—closer to absolute zero than most other astronomical measurements—and a testament to how much space (and the waves within it) has stretched. Their measurements have been repeated with better instruments, which give us a reading of 2.73 K. So Penzias and Wilson came very close. Rounding this value, scientists often refer to “the 3-degree microwave background.”

Many other experiments on Earth and in space soon confirmed the discovery by Penzias and Wilson: The radiation was indeed coming from all directions (it was isotropic) and matched the predictions of the Big Bang theory with remarkable precision. Penzias and Wilson had inadvertently observed the glow from the primeval fireball. They received the Nobel Prize for their work in 1978. And just before his death in 1966, Lemaître learned that his “vanished brilliance” had been discovered and confirmed.

Watch the below video by National Geographic to learn what happened after emission of the CMB and to review the earlier stages of the universe's formation.

Text Attributions

• Chapter 29 of OpenStax’s Astronomy 2e (2022) by Andrew Fraknoi, David Morrison, and Sidney Wolff. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Access full book for free at this link.
• Chapter 22 by Karla Panchuk in of Physical Geology - 2nd Edition (2019) by Steven Earle. Licensed under CC BY 4.0, except where otherwise noted.
• Chapter 17 of Introduction to Earth Science, Second Edition (2025) by Laura Neser. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
• Chapter 8 of An Introduction to Geology (2017) by Chris Johnson, Matthew D. Affolter, Paul Inkenbrandt, and Cam Mosher. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Media References

• "Origins of the Universe 101." YouTube, uploaded by National Geographic, 1 Mar 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdPzOWlLrbE.