The Big Bang

Since the early part of the 1900s, one explanation of the origin and fate of the universe, the Big
Bang theory, has dominated the discussion. Proponents of the Big Bang maintain that, between
13 billion and 15 billion years ago, all the matter and energy in the known cosmos was crammed
into a tiny, compact point. In fact, according to this theory, matter and energy back then were the
same thing, and it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.
Adherents of the Big Bang believe that this small but incredibly dense point of primitive
matter/energy exploded. Within seconds the fireball ejected matter/energy at velocities
approaching the speed of light. At some later timemaybe seconds later, maybe years later
energy and matter began to split apart and become separate entities. All of the different
elements in the universe today developed from what spewed out of this original explosion.
Big Bang theorists claim that all of the galaxies, stars, and planets still retain the explosive
motion of the moment of creation and are moving away from each other at great speed. This
supposition came from an unusual finding about our neighboring galaxies. In 1929 astronomer
Edwin Hubble, working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, announced that all of the
galaxies he had observed were receding from us, and from each other, at speeds of up to
several thousand miles per second.
The Redshift
To clock the speeds of these galaxies, Hubble took advantage of the Doppler effect. This
phenomenon occurs when a source of waves, such as light or sound, is moving with respect to
an observer or listener. If the source of sound or light is moving toward you, you perceive the
waves as rising in frequency: sound becomes higher in pitch, whereas light becomes shifted
toward the blue end of the visible spectrum. If the source is moving away from you, the waves
drop in frequency: sound becomes lower in pitch, and light tends to shift toward the red end of
the spectrum. You may have noticed the Doppler effect when you listen to an ambulance siren:
the sound rises in pitch as the vehicle approaches, and falls in pitch as the vehicle races away.
To examine the light from the galaxies, Hubble used a spectroscope, a device that analyzes the
different frequencies present in light. He discovered that the light from galaxies far off in space
was shifted down toward the red end of the spectrum. Where in the sky each galaxy lay didn't
matterall were redshifted. Hubble explained this shift by concluding that the galaxies were in
motion, whizzing away from Earth. The greater the redshift, Hubble assumed, the greater the
galaxy's speed.

Some galaxies showed just a slight redshift. But light from others was shifted far past red into
the infrared, even down into microwaves. Fainter, more distant galaxies seemed to have the
greatest red shifts, meaning they were traveling fastest of all.
An Expanding Universe
So if all the galaxies are moving away from Earth, does that mean Earth is at the center of the
universe? The very vortex of the Big Bang? At first glance, it would seem so. But astrophysicists
use a clever analogy to explain why it isn't. Imagine the universe as a cake full of raisins sitting
in an oven. As the cake is baked and rises, it expands. The raisins inside begin to spread apart
from each other. If you could select one raisin from which to look at the others, you'd notice that
they were all moving away from your special raisin. It wouldn't matter which raisin you picked,
because all the raisins are getting farther apart from each other as the cake expands. What's
more, the raisins farthest away would be moving away the fastest, because there'd be more
cake to expand between your raisin and these distant ones.
That's how it is with the universe, say Big Bang theorists. Since the Big Bang explosion, they
reason, the universe has been expanding. Space itself is expanding, just as the cake expanded
between the raisins in their analogy. No matter whether you're looking from Earth or from an
alien planet billions of miles away, all other galaxies are moving away from you as space
expands. Galaxies farther from you move faster away from you, because there's more space
expanding between you and those galaxies. That's how Big Bang theorists explain why light
from the more distant galaxies is shifted farther to the red end of the spectrum. In fact, most
astronomers now use this rule, known as Hubble's law, to measure the distance of an object
from Earththe bigger the redshift, the more distant the object.
In 1965 two scientists made a blockbuster discovery that solidified the Big Bang theory. Arno
Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Telephone Laboratories detected faint microwave radiation
that came from all points of the sky. They and other physicists theorized that they were seeing
the afterglow from the Big Bang's explosion. Since the Big Bang affected the entire universe at
the same moment in time, the afterglow should permeate the entire universe and could be
detected no matter what direction you looked. This afterglow is called the cosmic background
radiation. Its wavelength and uniformity fit nicely with other astronomers' mathematical
calculations about the Big Bang.
How Lumpy Do You Like Your Universe?

The Big Bang model is not uniformly accepted, however. One problem with the theory is that it
predicts a smooth universe. That is, the distribution of matter, on a large scale, should be
roughly the same wherever you look. No place in the universe should be unduly lumpy.
But in 2001, astronomers announced the discovery of a group of galaxies and quasars that fills
more than 125 million million cubic light-years of space, and is presently the largest structure in
the universe. Instead of an even distribution of matter, the universe seems to contain great
empty spaces punctuated by densely packed streaks of matter.
Big Bang proponents maintain that their theory is not flawed. They argue that gravity from huge,
undetected objects in space (clouds of cold, dark matter we can't see with telescopes, or socalled cosmic strings) attracts matter into clumps. Other astronomers, still reluctant to believe in
invisible objects just to solve an inexplicable problem, continue to question fundamental aspects
of the Big Bang theory.
In spite of its problems, the Big Bang is still considered by most astronomers to be the best
theory we have. As with any scientific hypothesis, however, more observation and
experimentation are needed to determine its credibility. Advances ranging from more-sensitive
telescopes to experiments in physics should add more fuel to the cosmological debate during
the coming decades.
The Steady State Theory
But the Big Bang is not the only proposed theory concerning our universe's origin. In the 1940s
a competing hypothesis arose, called the Steady State theory. Some astronomers turned to this
idea simply because, at the time, there wasn't enough information to test the Big Bang. British
astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and others argued that the universe was not only uniform in space
an idea called the cosmological principlebut also unchanging in time, a concept called the
perfect cosmological principle. This theory didn't depend on a specific event like the Big Bang.
Under the Steady State theory, stars and galaxies may change, but on the whole the universe
has always looked the way it does now, and it always will.
The Big Bang predicts that as galaxies recede from one another, space becomes progressively
emptier. The Steady State theorists admit that the universe is expanding, but predict that new
matter continually comes to life in the spaces between the receding galaxies. Astronomers
propose that this new material is made up of atoms of hydrogen, which slowly coalesce in open
space to form new stars.

Naturally, continuous creation of matter from empty space has met with criticism. How can you
get something from nothing? The idea violates a fundamental law of physics: the conservation
of matter. According to this law, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but only converted
into other forms of matter, or into energy. But skeptical astronomers have found it hard to
directly disprove the continuous creation of matter, because the amount of matter formed under
the Steady State theory is so very tiny: about one atom every billion years for every several
cubic feet of space.
The Steady State theory fails, however, in one important way. If matter is continuously created
everywhere, then the average age of stars in any section of the universe should be the same.
But astronomers have found that not to be true.
Astronomers can figure out how old a galaxy or star is by measuring its distance from Earth.
The farther away from Earth an object is, the longer it has taken light from the object to travel
across space and reach Earth. That means that the most distant objects we can see are also
the oldest.
For example, take quasars, the small points of light that give off enormous amounts of radio
energy. Because the light from quasars is shifted so far to the red end of the spectrum,
astronomers use Hubble's law to calculate that these powerhouses lie at a great distance from
Earth, and hence are very old. But quasars exist only at these great distancesnone are found
nearer. If the Steady State theory were true, there ought to be both young and old quasars.
Since astronomers haven't found quasars that formed recently, they conclude the universe must
have changed over time. The discovery of quasars has put the Steady State theory on unsteady
ground.
The Plasma Universe and Little Bangs
Not happy with either the Big Bang or the Steady State theory? A minority of astronomers are
formulating other views of the creation of the universe. One model comes from the mind of
Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvn, a Swedish plasma physicist. Called the Plasma Universe, his
model starts by noting that 99 percent of the observable universe (including the stars) is made
of plasma. Plasma, an ionized gas that conducts electricity, is sometimes called the fourth state
of matter. This theory states that the Big Bang never happened, and that the universe is
crisscrossed by gigantic electric currents and huge magnetic fields.
Under this view the universe has existed forever, chiefly under the influence of an
electromagnetic force. Such a universe has no distinct beginning and no predictable end. In the

Plasma Universe, galaxies come together slowly over a much greater time span than in the Big
Bang theory, perhaps taking as long as 100 billion years.
Little of the evidence for the Plasma Universe comes from direct observations of the sky.
Instead, it comes from laboratory experiments. Computer simulations of plasmas subjected to
high-energy fields reveal patterns that look like simulated galaxies. Using actual electromagnetic
fields in the laboratory, researchers have also been able to replicate the plasma patterns seen in
galaxies. While still a minority view, the Plasma Universe is gaining favor with younger, more
laboratory-minded astronomers who value hard empirical evidence over mathematical proofs.
Meanwhile, another group of astronomers is developing a steady-state theory that actually
conforms to astronomical observations. Like its predecessor, this steady-state theory proposes
a universe with no beginning and no end. Rather, matter is continuously created via a
succession of "Little Bangs," perhaps associated with mysterious quasars. In this new theory,
galaxies would form at a rate determined by the pace at which the universe expands. These
theorists can even account for the cosmic background radiation: they maintain that the
microwaves are actually coming from a cloud of tiny iron particlesand are not the residual
effects of some primordial explosion.
The End of the Universe
Will the universe continue expanding? Will it just stop or even begin to contract? The answer
depends on the amount of mass that the universe contains. If the universe's mass exceeds a
certain crucial value, then gravity should eventually stop everything from flying away from
everything else.
With enough mass, the universe will eventually succumb to the overpowering force of gravity
and collapse again into a single pointa theory often called the Big Crunch. But without enough
mass, the universe will continue to expand. As of 2001, many scientists concluded that the latter
hypothesis appears to be the most likely.
In 1998, astronomers found an even more remarkable puzzle: the universe seems to be
accelerating while expanding, as if being pulled by some kind of "antigravity" force. Other
astronomers have since corroborated this finding using a variety of methods, and have all but
confirmed the existence of this mysterious "dark energy."

Theories of the Universe

Scientific Origins of the Universe.

Bang That Drum.

A Big Bang Alternative.

The Accelerating Universe.

Plasma Cosmology.

The Standard Model.

The Alpha and the Omega.

It's Out of Control.

Is there any other evidence for the Big Bang?
Three other major pieces of evidence indicate that the Big Bang occurred. The first is
called the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), which is a weak form of
radiation that comes from the sky and is energy that is left over from the very early
universe (fig. 14). The CMBR was predicted during World War II, and in the 1960's it
was detected for the first time. Since then, it has been measured and remeasured and
now ranks as the most precise scientific measurement ever made. The second major
piece of evidence concerns the fraction of various kinds of atoms in the universe.
Scientists have calculated the amount of helium and other light atoms that should have
been formed in the first few minutes after the Big Bang. The predictions agree
remarkably well with what is observed. The third piece of evidence comes from our
own eyes. Telescopes currently in use in Kansas and elsewhere allow us to see
faraway galaxies as they appeared close to the time of the Big Bang because light
takes so long to reach us from such distant objects. The observations continue to fit
our interpretation of a universe that was very different early in its history. At the
present time, we do not understand everything about the development of the universe.
The work of science is not finished. We do not yet know how it started or what
the dark matter is. We are, however, very confident that, in general, the Big Bang
model is correct, and many physicists and astronomers are now working to fill in the
details.
Fig. 14--The cosmic microwave background is the afterglow radiation left over from
the Big Bang. Shown here are cosmological fluctuations in the microwave
background temperature made by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite
(Spergel et al., 1999). Although extremely uniform all over the sky, tiny temperature

variations can offer great insight into the origin, development, and initial structure of
the universe.