47
Let's interpret your question to be about whether the conditions would permit blobs of water to remain liquid, whether or not water existed yet. And the answer is No, because the pressure was by then far too low. Basically, space was already a vacuum, just not as hard a vacuum as intergalactic space is now.
It is appealing to imagine an era when the universe ...
38
I think your question is on topic, but @RhysW has linked a very helpful post in understanding why your question is a common misconception about the Big Bang.
No Center
There is no 'center' to the universe. At any point, a local observer will claim that they are at the center of the universe by the way galaxies move away from them. How can we possibly know ...
38
I think that your thought process is flawed in that you assume that by drastically increasing the temperature you are guaranteed to get heavy elements. As odd as this may sound, this isn't the case (especially during the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN)) for a few reasons. In fact, if you took a hydrogen-only star and made it go supernova, you wouldn't get ...
38
The universe is expanding on a large scale. But locally things are always messy.
Locally, galaxies are not set in stone, they move relative to each other, and the directions are random. If they're moving towards each other fast enough, then they will collide.
Also, there's gravity. Some galaxies are bound to each other by gravity, and that will tend to ...
37
The Pauli Exclusion Principle forbids two indistinguishable fermions occupying the same quantum state. It does not prevent them getting arbitrarily close together so long as they have very different momentum states.
The big bang model relies on classical General Relativity. When we go back to scales where quantisation of space might become important (i.e. ...
26
Your problem essentially arises from trying to apply Schwarzschild black hole logic, the assumptions of which are pretty much maximally violated at the big bang.
The following were true at the big bang, and violate the usual black hole formation logic.
The event occurred everywhere in space, not actually a point. In particular, the energy was uniformly ...
23
You're envisioning the Big Bang as a cosmological "explosion" in space where the universe is the resulting material expanding in outward all directions.
The problem is, the universe doesn't work like that.
The universe isn't a region of space that is expanding outward into another thing where you can (even hypothetically) fly out to the border and say, "...
21
As others have mentioned in the comments, there wouldn't have been any oxygen to form water. Soon after the Big Bang, the protons were hot or dense enough to fuse up to helium and some lithium but nothing heavier. Heavier elements were eventually fused in the first stars and partially dispersed in space by their winds and when they exploded as supernovae, ...
20
Your are misunderstanding the expansion of the Universe. The Big-Bang is not an explosion: this is the moment in time when the Universe had an (near) infinite density. So there is no center in the Universe as there is no center of the SURFACE of the earth (this is the most popular 2-dimensional analog).
Since this primordial ultra-high density state, the ...
19
Yes, here.
As has already been mentioned, the big bang happened everywhere due to the fact that all of time and space was in the same spot at the point of the Big Bang. And so the big bang happened here, there and everywhere. This is also similar to saying that the universe has no centre.
I have seen this phenomenon explained using two pieces of clear ...
17
Currently, there's no single explanation for this.
The simplest explanation is that there isn't any imbalance — there are large antimatter bodies in the universe; just separated from us. However, these would have to be pretty far away (otherwise the boundary annihilation would be detectable). Theoretically, this requires antimatter to have clumped ...
14
In one sense any point you choose is at "the centre" of the universe and at any point in the universe, at a large scale, the universe looks the same as at any other point. This is not the same as saying the universe is infinite, though (but it could be).
The analogy with an explosion is a poor one, as explosions expand into existing space. With the Big Bang ...
14
No. There is no consensus.
The discrepancy between the predicted big bang nucleosynthetic abundance of Lithium 7 and the measured value can be summarised as follows.
If we take what we know about the the baryonic mass density of the universe and the Hubble constant, we get a self-consistent picture between the cosmic microwave background, observations of ...
13
What I mean is, even if it is capable of expanding, if everything originated at the big bang how can that space turn to be infinite in a finite time - the age of the universe.
In the standard ΛCDM model of the Big Bang, the universe is infinite and has always been such. The Big Bang singularity happened everywhere, in the sense that far back enough in time, ...
12
No. The furthest we can see is the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). Early on (after the big bang), matter was fully ionised and the electrons frequently interacted with the photons. That has two consequences. First, the radition was that of a blackbody at the same temperature as the matter. Second, the universe was opaque, i.e. photons couldn't ...
12
No one knows what came before the Big Bang if, indeed, anything did. Theories include:
The Ekpyrotic universe theory where the BB was the result of the
collision of branes.
Various oscillating universe theories where
the expansion of the universe ultimately reverses into a Big Crunch
Quantum fluctuation models where a zero-net-energy universe is a
quantum ...
10
A black hole is a region of spacetime separated by an event horizon, which means no signals from the interior can propagate outward, no matter how long one waits. Locally, there is nothing special about the event horizon; if you fall in a black hole, there is nothing marking that you've crossed and no local experiment (short in space and duration) that will ...
10
Okay, I think I know what Max Tegmark is talking about in the video. He is referring to the fact that, when you observe the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) — i.e. the radiation that was "released" when the Universe had expanded and cooled sufficiently to allow protons and electron to combine into neutral hydrogen without immediately being ionized ...
10
By observing the observable universe we can gather a lot of data about the constituents of the universe now and in previous epochs, right back to the cosmic microwave background. This data places quite narrow constraints on viable models of the Big Bang. This is why cosmologists are confident about the details of the Big Bang, certainly from electroweak ...
9
In the standard models of the Big Bang, there is no such thing as the "edge of the expansion front". The universe, as far as we can see and as far as standard cosmology assumes, is homogeneous and isotropic on the large scale, so there is no edge or anything analogous to an the shock front of an explosion.
According to the seven-year WMAP results [pdf], the ...
9
It's all around us.
The way I explain it is that we are in the centre of the universe (I don't mean in the geocentric way as thought back in the middle ages where all is moving around us). Everywhere we look we see the past: our Sun how it was 8 minutes ago; the closer star, Alpha Centauri, as it was 4.2 years ago, the Andromeda galaxy's light took 2.5 ...
9
I think the source of confusion between the two concepts - the Big Bang singularity and an infinite universe - is the misconception that the universe began as a finite expanse originally. This misconception easily arises from analogies using present-day logic and numbers that were not applicable in the early universe. For example, I've heard it said that ...
9
Those galaxies were 10 billion light years away from Earth. So light would take much more time to reach here and that light which is now 10 billion years older can be seen now. Even light from the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach to us. So if somehow sun disappears suddenly(very unlikely) we wouldn't know for 8 minutes.
9
The Big-Bang was not an explosion in empty space.
Inter-galactic space is not empty, there is an inter-galactic medium, gas clouds and material ejected from galaxies, including stars and possibly globular clusters, by various mechanisms...
9
The temperature of a gas is a measure of the kinetic energy of the particles. For molecules you can have rotational and vibrational energy, while for single atoms you just have translational energy, or "thermal motion". At a given temperature, the particles don't have exactly the same energy, but a distribution of energies, and hence velocities.
Most (>90%) ...
9
The galaxies don't really get "off track" - it's not impossible, but that kind of thing probably doesn't happen anymore (as space continues to expand). What actually happens is that galaxies form gravitationally bound clusters - within the cluster, the acceleration due to gravity is larger than the equivalent expansion of space between the galaxies, so ...
9
I'm not sure that anyone has answered the question asked. The root cause is indeed that gravitationally bound structures with freefall timescales that are much shorter than the age of the universe are not greatly affected by the general expansion of the universe (NB: Structures with freefall timescales longer than this are not going to be the source of many ...
9
There are several processes at work:
Fission (of unstable elements) increases the number of atoms.
Fusion (occurs in stars and supernovae) decreases the number of atoms.
you could claim the formation of neutron stars decreases the number of atoms: it reduces atoms to just neutrons
you could claim the formation of black holes decreases the number of atoms: ...
9
Einstein's opinions were not static, and he lived at a time when there were several competing theories and not much observational evidence.
Einstein introduced a cosmological constant $\Lambda$ into his equations, the purpose of which was to allow for a steady cosmos with no expansion or contraction. He is said to have later regretted this addition. He was ...
9
I think this is at best a weird typo, but more likely a confusion by the authors (who are not cosmologists or astronomers, but a biologist and a geologist).
The book is 10 years old, but our view of the timeline of the evolution of the Universe was pretty much the same then. Note that the calculation of the size of the Universe as a function of time is a bit ...
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