Do you know how the universe was created?

Everything kicked off with nada—zero stars, no galaxies, space didn’t exist, no concept of time. We got just this super small, mega packed super hot spot named a singularity. In this little dot, all the energy, space, and time sat tight to turn into what we now call the universe. But thinking about what was up before that, or what made it pop into reality? Man, those head-scratchers are still up in the air; all our physics smarts just don’t cut it at that point in the game.

the singularity didn’t just blow up—it grew bigger. It wasn’t stuff blowing up in space but space getting bigger all over. We call this event the Big Bang, and it’s the universe’s starting point from 13.8 billion years back. In a super short moment, the universe puffed up quicker than light can zip. This speedy growth known as inflation, made the universe even all over and got things ready for all that came next.

The universe started to chill as it got bigger. Nature’s four main powers—the forces named gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force—split from a shared original force. Little bits popped up first, the ones called quarks followed by protons and neutrons. When the universe hit the one-second mark, everything needed to make stuff was all set.

Right after the Big Bang kicked things off, the universe was like a super-hot soup of zapping energy. Things started to cool down a tiny bit, and that’s when protons and neutrons began smashing into each other. They stuck together in a thing we call nucleosynthesis — that’s like the birth of the universe’s first simple elements. Hydrogen showed up first. No surprise, since it’s super simple; it claimed about 75% of all the stuff floating around out there. Then came Helium grabbing almost 25% of the mix. A couple of other newbies lithium and beryllium, popped up too, but they were just tiny specks in the grand scheme of things.

The cosmos got bigger and colder, and around 380,000 years past the Big Bang, a mega-important event happened. Electrons hooked up with nuclei making neutral atoms and giving light the green light to zip across space free as a bird. That light now just a chill twinkle, we call the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). It’s like the oldie but goodie light of the cosmos, a baby picture from way back when, and it’s super solid proof that the Big Bang happened.

The cosmos was nothing but a vast, pitch-black sea of hydrogen and helium for ages. Still tiny ripples in the cosmic microwave background density started to grow because gravity was pulling on them. Dark matter, this unseen stuff that’s around 27% of everything out there, was super important. It yanked the regular stuff together setting up the earliest cosmic formations.

200 million years post Big Bang boom, the very first stars flared up. Called Population III stars, they were huge, didn’t last long, and were made of just hydrogen and helium. When they went out with a bang as supernovas, they tossed out a bunch of new heavy stuff like carbon, oxygen, and iron.

Stars bunched up over time making the first galaxy clusters. The “Milky Way” took form 13.6 billion years back. As galaxies smashed into each other and combined, they crafted the huge space network we gaze upon now.

About 4.6 billion years ago, a gas and dust cloud known as the “solar nebula” began its collapse in a chill spot of the Milky Way. Perhaps a nearby supernova’s explosion kick-started it, the nebula’s spin got quicker and it shaped into a pancake-like disk. A lot of the stuff got sucked into the center giving birth to the “Sun”.

Dust and ice smacking into each other around the fresh Sun created “planetesimals.” These chunks grew into “protoplanets” and then into our solar system’s planets. About 4.5 billion years back, Earth popped up. It was a blazing ball of stone and metal. Stuff like iron headed for the center while the soft things made up the surface.

That’s when a big rock as big as Mars, which we call “Theia,” smacked into fresh Earth. All the bits from that smash turned into the “Moon.” When Earth got cooler, the water air turned into the first seas, and it was like the universe laid out the welcome mat for life to get started.

Way back when, Earth’s oceans were like a giant mixing bowl with lots of organic stuff floating around. Zaps from lightning rumbling volcanoes, and some intense sun rays kicked off a bunch of chemical reactions. These reactions popped out important life bits, like amino acids. Take the Miller-Urey experiment for instance; it proved that early Earth-like conditions could cook up these molecules.

Somewhere between 3.5 and 4 billion years back, life decided to make an entrance. We’re talking about basic single-cell critters called prokaryotes. These tiny life forms were all about making their own energy from chemicals or sunlight, and they were pretty good at it too! While they were at it, they pumped out oxygen and started to shake up Earth’s atmosphere big time.

For eons, through natural selection, life’s complexity grew giving rise to the vast variety of species present today. It’s been 2 billion years since eukaryotic cells popped up sporting their intricate structures. About 540 million years back, a significant event known as the Cambrian Explosion led to a fast-paced emergence of the majority of big animal factions. Both flora and fauna started making homes on terra firma around 500 million years past.

Driven by the enigma known as dark energy, our universe keeps on stretching out wide. This peculiar force is about 68% of everything out there and is pushing galaxies further away quicker and quicker. So what’s gonna happen next? Well, the brains of the science world have a few guesses:

The universe just keeps getting bigger, and , all the stars go out and stuff breaks down. What’s left is super cold dark, and empty.

What if that dark energy stuff isn’t as tough as we think? Maybe everything gets pulled back together by gravity and squishes into one tiny point.

And think about this one. If dark energy gets even meaner, it might rip everything up, from the big galaxy clusters right down to the tiny atoms.

The universe’s tale spanning from the Big Bang to when stars, galaxies, planets, and life took shape, is super intricate and stunning. Loads of puzzles still exist, like figuring out what dark matter and dark energy are. But hey, science gives us a solid and checkable way to get how it all kicked off. This narrative is still getting written, with clues found in starlight and the Big Bang’s own reverberations.

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