11/08/2019 A universe is born | symmetry magazine

Illustration by Sandbox Studio, Chicago with Corinne Mucha

A universe is born
0 5 / 0 7 / 1 9 | By Diana Kwon

Take a (brief) journey through the early history of our cosmos.

The universe was a busy place during the rst three minutes. The cosmos we see today expanded from a tiny speck to
much closer to its current massive size; the elementary particles appeared; and protons and neutrons combined into
the rst nuclei, lling the universe with the precursors of elements.

By developing clever theories and conducting experiments with particle colliders, telescopes and satellites, physicists
have been able to wind the lm of the universe back billions of years—and glimpse the details of the very rst
moments in the history of our cosmic home.

Take an abridged tour through this history:

The Planck epoch

Time: < 10-43 seconds
Welcome to the Planck epoch, named after the smallest scale of measurements possible in particle physics today.
This is currently the closet scientists can get to the beginning of time.

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Theoretical physicists don’t know much about the earliest moments of the universe. After the Big Bang theory gained
popularity, scientists thought that in the rst moments, the cosmos was at its hottest and densest and that all four
fundamental forces—electromagnetic, weak, strong and gravitational—were combined into a single, uni ed force. But
the current leading theoretical framework for our universe’s beginning doesn’t necessarily require these conditions.

The universe expands

Time: From 10-43 seconds to about 10-36 seconds
In this stage, which began either at Planck time or shortly after it, scientists think the universe underwent superfast,
exponential expansion in a process known as in ation.

Physicists rst proposed the theory of in ation in the 1980s to address the shortcomings of the Big Bang theory,
which, despite its popularity, could not explain why the universe was so at and uniform, and why its di erent parts
began expanding simultaneously.

During in ation, quantum uctuations could have stretched out to produce a pattern that later determined the
locations of galaxies. It might have been only after this period of in ation the universe became a hot, dense reball as
described in the Big Bang theory.

The elementary particles are born

Time: ~10-36 seconds
When the universe was still very hot, the cosmos was like a gigantic accelerator, much more powerful than the Large
Hadron Collider, running at extremely high energies. In it, the elementary particles we know today were born.

Scientists think that rst came exotic particles, followed by more familiar ones, such as electrons, neutrinos and
quarks. It could be that dark matter particles came about during this time.

The quarks soon combined, forming the familiar protons and neutrons, which are collectively known as baryons.
Neutrinos were able to escape this plasma of charged particles and began traveling freely through space, while
photons continued to be trapped by the plasma.

The rst nuclei emerge

Time: ~1 second to 3 minutes
Scientists think that when the universe cooled enough for violent collisions to subside, protons and neutrons clumped
together into nuclei of the light elements—hydrogen, helium and lithium—in a process known as Big Bang
nucleosynthesis.

Protons are more stable than neutrons, due to their lower mass. In fact, a free neutron decays with a 15-minute half-
life, while protons may not decay at all, as far as we know.

So as the particles combined, many protons remained unpaired. As a result, hydrogen—protons that never found a
partner—make up around 74% of the mass of “normal” matter in our cosmos. The second most abundant element is
helium, which makes up approximately 24%, followed by trace amounts of deuterium, lithium, and helium-3 (helium
with a three-baryon core).

Scientists have been able to accurately measure the density of baryons in our universe. Most of those measurements
line up with theorists’ estimations of what the quantities ought to be, but there is one lingering issue: Lithium
calculations are o by a factor of three. It could be that the measurements are o , but it could also be that something
we don’t yet know about happened during this time period to change the abundance of lithium.

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(https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/sites/default/ les/images/standard/Inline_History_of_the_universe.jpg)
Illustration by Sandbox Studio, Chicago with Corinne Mucha

The cosmic microwave background becomes visible

Time: 380,000 years
Hundreds of thousands of years after in ation, the particle soup had cooled enough for electrons to bind to nuclei to
form electrically neutral atoms. Through this process, which is also known as recombination, photons became free to
traverse the universe, creating the cosmic microwave background.

Today, the CMB is one of the most valuable tools for cosmologists, who probe its depths in search of answers for
many of the universe’s lingering secrets, including the nature of in ation and the cause of matter-antimatter
asymmetry.

Shortly after the CMB became detectable, neutral hydrogen particles formed into a gas that lled the universe.
Without any objects emitting high-energy photons, the cosmos was plunged into the dark ages for millions of years.

The earliest stars shine

Time: ~100 million years
The dark ages ended with the formation of the rst stars and the occurrence of reionization, a process through which
highly energetic photons stripped electrons o neutral hydrogen atoms.

Scientists think that the vast majority of the ionizing photons emerged from the earliest stars. But other processes,
such as collisions between dark matter particles, may have also played a role.

At this time, matter began to form the rst galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains stars that were born when
the universe was only several hundred million years old.

Our sun is born

Time: 9.2 billion years
The sun is one of a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Scientists think it formed from a giant cloud of gas that
consisted mostly hydrogen and helium.

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Today
Time: 13.8 billion years
Today, our cosmos sits at a cool 2.7 Kelvin (minus 270.42 degrees Celsius). The universe is expanding at an increasing
rate, in a manner similar to (but many orders of magnitude slower than) in ation.

Physicists think that dark energy—a mysterious repulsive force that currently accounts for about 70% of the energy in
our universe—is most likely driving that accelerated expansion.

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