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Asked by anon-240657 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 9 Mar 2020.
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Tom Dally answered on 9 Mar 2020: last edited 11 Mar 2020 6:04 pm
There are physicists in this zone who are *way* better qualified to answer this than me. But my understanding is that the big bang theory currently represents the best model for explaining how the universe began, based upon the data that we have.
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Ben Cropper answered on 10 Mar 2020:
There’s a lot of evidence for the big bang.
The first one is that everything seems to be moving away from everything else. If you look back in time, it makes sense that it’s been doing that since everything was in one place. There must have been a “big bang” where everything started moving apart.
The second is that the elements we see in space match those that we see in stars. That means that the universe would once have been squashed enough together that it looked basically like a massive star, and was doing nuclear fusion.
The third is that we can still kind of see it! There was a time where the universe was completely opaque – you couldn’t see through it. Eventually, expanded enough so that you could – all of the light that was bouncing around in there was suddenly free to move – and we can still see that light hitting the Earth today. It’s called the Cosmic Microwave Background.
There’s more stuff to do with how the structure of galaxy clusters only works with a Big Bang, but that’s all fairly tedious and not as in your face as the other bits of evidence. Hope this helps!
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