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How was the Universe Created?

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Author Topic: How was the Universe Created?  (Read 2895 times)
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Baphomet
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« Reply #90 on: August 17, 2008, 03:22:27 am »

James Fullsome

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Rate Member   posted 01-28-2006 09:12 PM                       
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The Epoch of Nucleosynthesis: 1 minute
The Epoch of Nucleosynthesis covers the time from 1 second to 3 minutes after the Big Bang. The temperature during this epoch is estimated to decrease from 1010 K to 109 K.

Three minutes after the Big Bang, the universe is too cool for nuclear activity to continue, and these reactions stop. At this point the universe's nuclei consist of about 75% hydrogen, 25% helium and trace amounts of deuterium, lithium, beryllium, and boron. Elements heavier than this do not have time to form before nuclear reactions stop. By looking at conditions between 1 second and 3 minutes after the Big Bang, one can predict the elemental abundance of the Universe. These predictions are broadly in agreement with observations.

The Deionization Epoch: 379,000 years
Epoch of Recombination
379,000 years after the Big Bang

The temperature of the Universe is approximately 3000 kelvins. At this temperature hydrogen nuclei capture electrons to form stable atoms. This event known as recombination is particularly significant because free electrons are effective at scattering light, which is why fire is not transparent, while hydrogen atoms will allow light to pass through.
This implies that this is the time at which space becomes transparent to light, since photons no longer interact strongly with atoms. This means that what we normally think of as matter and what we normally think of as energy become separate.
The light from the moment at which the universe became transparent has been redshifted to radio waves and makes up the cosmic microwave background.

Light energy from the initial expansion of the Universe stretches out and weakens to the point where matter finally dominates in influence (this is the generally agreed-to end of the Big Bang era). Telescopes are not able to see further back in time than this time because before this time, the Universe was too hot for atoms to be stable. The matter existed as ions because the electrons had too much energy to stay in atoms. The ions caused the Universe to be opaque to light because free electrons can absorb any wavelength of light. Once the universe cooled enough for the combination rate of atoms to be greater than the rate of ionization, the electrons and light nuclei formed atoms. The electrons in atoms can only absorb specific wavelengths of photons. Photons of other wavelengths pass by without being absorbed. This made the universe transparent to most wavelengths.

Since they cannot get images from before deionization, scientists must use particle accelerators and theoretical physics to infer what occurred indirectly. The most direct evidence scientists can measure from the Big Bang is the cosmic microwave background radiation that is uniformly pervasive throughout the Universe. It is thought this background radiation is actually a snapshot of the early Universe and provides the best evidence of the creation of matter during the early epochs.
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