In One Cubic Centimetre There Around 300 Photons That Were Created In The Big Bang

Fact Of The Day: In one cubic centimetre there around 300 photons (bosons for the electromagnetic force) that were created in the big bang.

Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation is a very hard to detect, 13.7 billion year old source of radiation and, as I said in my previous post, is a crucial piece of evidence that the Big Bang occurred. This tells us that the Big Bang occurred because CMB was formed when the universe was extremely hot, and it comes from every direction.

Another piece of evidence is that the universe is expanding. As it is expanding, there must have been a place in time that it was infinitely small.
We know that the universe is expanding because of something called redshift. We can see (through a telescope) that some of the farthest galaxies that we can see are all red, or redshifted. This light has been travelling towards us for over 13 billion years, and because of the expansion of the universe, these light waves have been stretched by the expansion of the universe. The outer edges of the observable universe are more redshifted than closer ones, which means that the galaxies farther away, are moving away quicker.
This is because the very space itself is expanding. If you draw three dots on a partially blown up balloon, with an equal distance apart, and blow it up more, all the distances between the dots get bigger, meaning that the dot twice as far away from one dot than another dot, the distance between the dots gets bigger twice as fast.

Dot 1.                   Dot 2.                   Dot 3.
           ------------- 20 spaces between
           ------------------------------------ 40 spaces between

Dot 1.                                       Dot 2.                                       Dot 3.
           ---------------------------- 40 spaces between
           ----------------------------------------------------------------- 80 spaces between

We don't actually know the cause of this expansion, but the most commonly accepted theory is that dark energy is fuelling this expansion. But, if this is true, the levels of dark energy in the universe are getting higher, because the rate of the universe's expansion is getting quicker.


In this picture from the Hubble Space Telescope (above) you can see some redshifted galaxies.

Comments

  1. Sheila Hayes3 April 2017 at 00:28

    Hey Nick, I love your science facts. Great job, keep it up!!!

    ReplyDelete

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