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This transition happened after about 400,000 years following the Big Bang.ģ) The relative abundances of light elements (He-4, He-3, Li-7, and Deuterium). Such a transition implies a hot, dense early universe that cooled as it expanded. This shows that the universe went through a transition from an ionized gas (a plasma) and a neutral gas. This implies a history where everything was closer together.Ģ) The properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). The three most important observations are:ġ) The Hubble Law shows that distant objects are receding from us at a rate proportional to their distance - which occurs when there is uniform expansion in all directions. So, a short answer to a slightly different question is that all of the observational evidence that we've gathered is consistent with the predictions of the Big Bang Theory. Mathematicians prove things, but scientists can only say that the evidence supports a theory with some degree of confidence that is always less than 100%. The best we can do is say that there is strong evidence for the Big Bang Theory and that every test we throw at it comes back in support of the theory. This isn't really a statement that we can make in general. Jason Steffens is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. We asked Jason Steffens, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a few frequently asked questions about the Big Bang Theory. Big Bang theory FAQs answered by an expert The two groups each published papers in the Astrophysical Journal in 1965. Simultaneously, a Princeton University team led by Robert Dicke was trying to find evidence of the CMB and realized that Penzias and Wilson had stumbled upon it with their strange observations. At first, they thought the anomaly was due to pigeons trying to roost inside the antenna and their waste, but they cleaned up the mess and killed the pigeons and the anomaly persisted.
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This accidental discovery happened when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, both of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, were building a radio receiver in 1965 and picked up higher-than-expected temperatures, according to a NASA article. (Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration, CC BY-SA)
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This information helps astronomers determine the age of the universe. Related: Peering back to the Big Bang & early universeĪ map of the background radiation left over from the Big Bang, taken by the ESA's Planck spacecraft, captured the oldest light in the universe. It was first predicted by Ralph Alpher and other scientists in 1948 but was found only by accident almost 20 years later. Sometimes called the "afterglow" of the Big Bang, this light is more properly known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This allowed light to finally shine through, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
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Over time, however, these free electrons met up with nuclei and created neutral atoms or atoms with equal positive and negative electric charges. "The free electrons would have caused light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in clouds," NASA stated. This early "soup" would have been impossible to actually see because it couldn't hold visible light. The cosmos now contained a vast array of fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons and protons - the raw materials that would become the building blocks for everything that exists today.
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This all happened within just the first second after the universe began, when the temperature of everything was still insanely hot, at about 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 billion Celsius), according to NASA. Hubble images show the far-distant galaxy GN-z11 as it appeared shortly after the Big Bang.
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