Who created our universe

Scientists have also discovered a predicted thermal imprint of the Big Bang, the universe-pervading "All of these things put the Big Bang on an extremely solid foundation," said astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley. "The Big Bang is an enormously successful theory." The beginning Traditional Big Bang theory posits that our universe began with a "The problem is, there's no reason whatsoever to believe general relativity in that regime," said Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech. "It's going to be wrong, because it doesn't take into account quantum mechanics. And quantum mechanics is certainly going to be important once you get to that place in the history of the universe." So the very beginning of the universe remains pretty murky. Scientists think they can pick the story up at about 10 to the minus 36 seconds — one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second — after the Big Bang. At that point, they believe, the universe underwent an extremely brief and dramatic period of inflation, expanding faster than the (Inflation may seem to violate the theory of special relativity, but that's not the case, scientists say. Special relativity holds that no information or matter can be carried between two points in space faster than the speed of light. But inflation was an expansion of space itself.) "Inflation was the 'bang' of the Big Bang," Filippenko told SPACE.com "Before inflation, there was just a little bit of stuff, qu...

Our Milky Way Galaxy was once thought to comprise the entire known universe. Today our universe encompasses many billions of galaxies, and its history can be recounted back to its earliest moments. Our universe began with an explosion of space itself - the Big Bang. Starting from extremely high density and temperature, space expanded, the universe cooled, and the simplest elements formed. Gravity gradually drew matter together to form the first stars and the first galaxies. Galaxies collected into groups, clusters, and superclusters. Some stars died in supernova explosions, whose chemical remnants seeded new generations of stars and enabled the formation of rocky planets. On at least one such planet, life evolved to consciousness. And it wonders, “Where did I come from?”

The Universe is everything we can touch, feel, sense, measure or detect. It includes living things, planets, stars, galaxies, dust clouds, light, and even time. Before the birth of the Universe, time, space and matter did not exist. The Universe contains billions of galaxies, each containing millions or billions of stars. The space between the stars and galaxies is largely empty. However, even places far from stars and planets contain scattered particles of dust or a few hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter. Space is also filled with radiation (e.g. light and heat), magnetic fields and high energy particles (e.g. cosmic rays). The Universe is incredibly huge. It would take a modern jet fighter more than a million years to reach the nearest star to the Sun. Travelling at the speed of light (300,000 km per second), it would take 100,000 years to cross our Milky Way galaxy alone. No one knows the exact size of the Universe, because we cannot see the edge – if there is one. All we do know is that the visible Universe is at least 93 billion light years across. (A light year is the distance light travels in one year – about 9 trillion km.) The Universe has not always been the same size. Scientists believe it began in a Big Bang, which took place nearly 14 billion years ago. Since then, the Universe has been expanding outward at very high speed. So the area of space we now see is billions of times bigger than it was when the Universe was very young. The galaxies are also moving fu...

The late physicist Stephen Hawking first asked me to work with him to develop “a new quantum theory of the Big Bang” in 1998. What started out as a doctoral project evolved over some 20 years into an intense collaboration that ended The enigma at the centre of our research throughout this period was how the Big Bang could have created Questions about the ultimate origin of the cosmos, or universe, take physics out of its comfort zone. Yet this was exactly where Hawking liked to venture. The prospect — or hope — to crack the riddle of cosmic design drove much of Hawking’s research in cosmology. “To boldly go where Star Trek fears to tread” was his motto – and also his screen saver. Our shared scientific quest meant that we inevitably grew close. Being around him, one could not fail to be influenced by his determination and optimism that we could tackle mystifying questions. He made me feel as if we were writing our own creation story, which, in a sense, we did. In the old days, it was thought that the apparent design of the cosmos meant there had to be a designer – a God. Today, scientists instead point to the laws of physics. These laws have a number of striking life-engendering properties. Take the amount of matter and energy in the universe, the delicate ratios of the forces, or the number of spatial dimensions. Physicists But where do the laws of physics come from? From Albert Einstein to Hawking in his earlier work, most 20th-century physicists regarded the mathematica...