No BANG! in the Big Bang Activity at item 35
Introduction
Most astronomers believe the Universe began in a Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. At that time, the entire universe was inside a bubble that was thousands of times smaller than a pinhead. It was hotter than anything we can imagine.
Then it suddenly exploded. The universe that we know was born. Time and space all began with the Big Bang. In a fraction of a second, the universe grew from smaller than a single atom to bigger than a galaxy. And it kept on growing at a fantastic rate. It is still expanding today.
Included in this page we think about pictures you see above which are often said to be the Big Bang and show them to be wrong.
- The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe.
- Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distances between moving points. In other words, the Big Bang is not an explosion in space, but rather an expansion of space.
- The Big Bang theory is model of the observable universe. A scientific model is a physical and/or representation of a system of ideas, events or processes.
- Scientists seek to identify and understand patterns in our world by drawing on their scientific knowledge to offer explanations that enable the patterns to be predicted.
- Nothing exploded in the Big Bang. Instead, the Big Bang is described as a hot, dense state that simply expands and cools. That's it: no explosion of any type.
- In the Big Bang, space was filled with light. A fraction of a second after the event, the universe was over a million trillion times smaller than an atom. It was also hot: a septillion (one followed by 24 zeroes) times hotter than the centre of the sun.
- Images similar to 1 and 2 above, of the Big Bang which head the page are usually suspect.
- Image 1 shows stars shooting out at the first millionth of its tiny time.
- Wrong!
- Image 2 shows planets emerging which is Wrong + milllions of !!!!!!!.
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- Image 3
- Snapshot from a computer simulation of the formation of large-scale structures in the universe, showing a patch of 100 million light-years and the resulting coherent motions of galaxies flowing toward the highest mass concentration in the centre.
- Let's face it: however well-known an astrophysicist, astronomer etc is, nobody would be prepared to stand up in the highest court and swear that this or that actually happened during the Big Bang!
- We continue to see a never-ending amount of images like this:
- Image 4
- You could draw your idea of the Big Bang.
- Another "let's face it". At the time of the Big Bang, imagine an astronaut from another universe is, say, so many millions of miles away. What will he/she hear?
- Nothing! Sound doesn't travel in a vacuum.
- Sound waves are travelling vibrations of particles in media such as air, water or metal. They cannot travel through empty space, where there are no atoms or molecules to vibrate.
