• Question: Can u explain the big bang and how the earth was made

    Asked by mariobalotelli45 to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 10 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Áine Broderick

      Áine Broderick answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      The Big Bang model suggests that at some moment all of space was contained in a single point, and about 13.8 billion years ago, the big bang happened. After the initial expansion, the universe cooled which led to the formation of subatomic particles, including protons, neutrons, and electrons. The majority of atoms produced by the Big Bang were hydrogen, along with helium and traces of lithium. Giant clouds of these elements later came together thanks to gravity to form stars and galaxies.

    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Hi mariobalotelli45!

      What a question! I will try!
      This was 13.7 billion years ago! To start of there wasn’t actually a big bang or explosion, just space all the sudden starting to stretch everywhere at once! In other words, the universe (everything that exists in space and time!) just suddenly sprang into existence: everything from nothing pretty much.
      It started with a tiny bubble (smaller than a fraction of an atom, one the smallest particle there is) that is unimaginably hot then expanded!

      Just one second after the Big Bang the universe kept stretching and expanding the temperature went down and the first particles could form because it wasn’t so hot anymore.

      Then, still 10 billion degrees hot, the first atoms formed, mostly hydrogen a very simple atom. No stars yet!
      When hydrogen gas clumped together under the force of gravity (which makes objects fall) stars formed for the first time and there was light!

      We still don’t know what actually happened right before Big Bang. And the natural laws don’t seem to make sense at all, so scientists are working very hard on finding this out!
      Scientist try to answer questions like: What started the Big Bang? What was there before? Are there other universes?

      Check out this funky video for some more cool facts here:

      Maybe the other scientists can explain how earth was made?

    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      I’s pretty much like the Lydia and Áine said. As far as I can remember (Not a physicist so I’m not very up to date on the latest research), scientists have manged to understand what happened a few billionths of a second after the big bang (which was not a bang, as there was no air for sound to travel in, and not big either, because the universe was tiny back then!), but our current models of physics don’t make much sense when we try to work out what happened before that.

      If science can figure it out, it’ll probably be a very clever team of quantum physicists that does it. Quantum physics is really good at working out what happens on very very tiny scales (like the particles that make up the particles that make up atoms, which are so small they sometimes doen’t actually exist! Quantum physics is very strange sometimes…)

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