After 380,000 years, the universe was the size of the Milky Way
VERN BENDER
Immediately after the big bang, the new universe was smooth throughout. It soon clumped up. The ripples in the gravity field caused the mass to be born. Seen and unseen particles came together. The universe was being formed, bottom-up. Wall structures, sheets, and filaments were forming, trapping newly born matter inside. More mass begets more gravity. Hot x-ray gas was forming dark matter. It functioned as a halo that trapped the mass that was being born within the walls below. This resulted in galaxies coming into existence. Concurrently, dark energy was put in place as a byproduct of the process. Dark energy expanded space to give the newly born galaxies room to stabilize and breathe.
Holding things together: Electromagnetic fields are a combination of invisible electric and magnetic fields of force. The strong force binds things together while gluons provide the glue. There are force and matter particles. Fermions, electrons, and quarks are matter particles. Bosons are force-carrying particles; they can pile up. Photons are bosons. Gluons bind quarks together. Every kind of particle has a fixed spin. Pions are made up of quarks which are bosons. Quantum mechanics causes gravity to quantize and decay into particles called gravitons. Gravitons have mass, and their motions generate kinetic energy. The mass of gravitons explains force at a distance. Time dilation is caused by gravity’s effects on the structure of spacetime.
Time keeps on pushing into darkness. The boundaries of the universe are expanding into oblivion. At first, space was expanding faster than the speed of light. Then, matter and anti-matter fought to the death. Matter won, but only by a majority of one for each unit of volume. We are the leftovers of that war. Next, a hot liquid soup formed that was full of subatomic particles. As the liquid colled down, protons and neutrons came together. The necessary electrons showed up a little later. Finally, the matter started to form. Note: Matter and energy are interchangeable.
After 380,000 years, the universe was the size of the Milky Way. The dense fog of electrons caused hydrogen and helium to form. A burst of ubiquitous light exploded into a brilliant flash of light. The lighter elements that were created turned into unstable stars that blew up quickly. These new stars manufactured more elements. Meanwhile, the universe went dark again. Finally, the universe lit up permanently when the latest batch of stars started up their nuclear furnaces.
The small cracks that first appeared on the surface of the universe would develop into stars and galaxies.
Concurrently, the cosmic web had to be put in place. The cosmic infrastructure of walls and filaments would contain the stars and keep them within their birth galaxy.
As these new stars exploded, they would seed their galaxy with all of the periodic table elements up to and including iron. Heavier than iron elements would have to be spread about with explosions of supernovas. A supernova explosion covers the rest of the periodic table of elements.
When a supernova’s core collapses, it explodes, with all of the heaviest elements being scattered about.
Our star is born, and all of the debris around it forms the planets. Earth gets an atmosphere. Life shows up, and here we are today.
The universe is currently in a flyaway mode. If this mode continues, you and everything else will rip apart. Black holes will be the last to go.
