In the scientific world it is generally accepted that the Universe originated as a result big bang. This theory is based on the fact that energy and matter (the foundations of all things) were previously in a state of singularity. It, in turn, is characterized by infinity of temperature, density and pressure. The state of singularity itself rejects all known modern world laws of physics. Scientists believe that the Universe arose from a microscopic particle, which, for reasons still unknown, came into an unstable state in the distant past and exploded.

The term “Big Bang” began to be used in 1949 after the publication of the works of the scientist F. Hoyle in popular science publications. Today, the theory of the “dynamic evolving model” is so well developed that physicists can describe the processes occurring in the Universe within 10 seconds after the explosion of a microscopic particle that laid the foundation for all things.

There are several proofs of the theory. One of the main ones is the cosmic microwave background radiation, which permeates the entire Universe. It could have arisen, according to modern scientists, only as a result of the Big Bang, due to the interaction of microscopic particles. It is the relict radiation that allows us to learn about those times when the Universe was like a burning space, and there were no stars, planets and the galaxy itself. The second proof of the birth of all things from the Big Bang is considered to be the cosmological red shift, which consists in a decrease in the frequency of radiation. This confirms the removal of stars and galaxies from the Milky Way in particular and from each other in general. That is, it indicates that the Universe was expanding earlier and continues to do so to this day.

A Brief History of the Universe

• 10 -45 - 10 -37 sec- inflationary expansion


• 10 -6 sec- emergence of quarks and electrons


• 10 -5 sec- formation of protons and neutrons


• 10 -4 sec - 3 min- emergence of deuterium, helium and lithium nuclei


• 400 thousand years- formation of atoms


• 15 million years- continued expansion of the gas cloud


• 1 billion years- the birth of the first stars and galaxies


• 10 - 15 billion years- emergence of planets and intelligent life


• 10 14 billion years- cessation of the process of star birth


• 10 37 billion years- energy depletion of all stars


• 10 40 billion years- evaporation of black holes and the birth of elementary particles


• 10 100 billion years- completion of the evaporation of all black holes

The Big Bang theory was a real breakthrough in science. It allowed scientists to answer many questions regarding the birth of the Universe. But at the same time, this theory gave rise to new mysteries. The main one is the cause of the Big Bang itself. The second question that has no answer modern science- how space and time appeared. According to some researchers, they were born along with matter and energy. That is, they are the result of the Big Bang. But then it turns out that time and space must have some kind of beginning. That is, a certain entity, constantly existing and independent of their indicators, could well have initiated the processes of instability in the microscopic particle that gave birth to the Universe.

The more research is carried out in this direction, the more questions astrophysicists have. The answers to them await humanity in the future.

Everyone has heard of the Big Bang theory, which explains (at least this moment) the origin of our Universe. However, in scientific circles there will always be those who want to challenge ideas - from this, by the way, great discoveries often arise.

However, Dicke realized that if this model were real, then there would not be two types of stars - Population I and Population II, young and old stars. And they were. This means that the Universe around us nevertheless developed from a hot and dense state. Even if it was not the only Big Bang in history.

Amazing, right? What if there were several of these explosions? Tens, hundreds? Science has yet to figure this out. Dicke invited his colleague Peebles to calculate the temperature required for the processes described and the probable temperature of the residual radiation today. Approximate calculations Peebles showed that today the Universe should be filled with microwave radiation with a temperature of less than 10 K, and Roll and Wilkinson were already preparing to look for this radiation when the bell rang...

Lost in translation

However, here it is worth moving to another corner globe- in USSR. The closest people to the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation (and also did not complete the job!) were in the USSR. Having done a huge amount of work over the course of several months, a report on which was published in 1964, Soviet scientists seemed to have put together all the pieces of the puzzle, only one was missing. Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, one of the colossi of Soviet science, carried out calculations similar to those carried out by the team of Gamow (a Soviet physicist living in the USA), and also came to the conclusion that the Universe must have begun with a hot Big Bang, which left background radiation with a temperature a few kelvins.

Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, -

He even knew about Ed Ohm's article in the Bell System Technical Journal, which roughly calculated the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation, but misinterpreted the author's conclusions. Why didn't Soviet researchers realize that Ohm had already discovered this radiation? Due to an error in translation. Ohm's paper stated that the sky temperature he measured was about 3 K. This meant that he had subtracted all possible sources of radio interference and that 3 K was the temperature of the remaining background.

However, by coincidence, the temperature of atmospheric radiation was also the same (3 K), for which Ohm also made a correction. Soviet specialists mistakenly decided that it was these 3 K that Ohm had left after all the previous adjustments, subtracted them too and were left with nothing.

Nowadays, such errors of understanding would be easily eliminated in the process email correspondence, but in the early 1960s communication between scientists Soviet Union and the United States was very difficult. This was the reason for such an offensive mistake.

The Nobel Prize that floated away

Let's go back to the day when the phone rang in Dicke's laboratory. It turns out that at the same time, astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson reported that they accidentally managed to detect faint radio noise coming from everything. Then they did not yet know that another team of scientists independently came up with the idea of ​​​​the existence of such radiation and even began to build a detector to search for it. It was the team of Dicke and Peebles.

Even more surprising is that the cosmic microwave background, or, as it is also called, cosmic microwave background radiation, was described more than ten years earlier within the framework of the model of the emergence of the Universe as a result of the Big Bang by George Gamow and his colleagues. Neither one nor the other group of scientists knew about this.

Penzias and Wilson accidentally learned about the work of scientists under Dicke's leadership and decided to call them to discuss it. Dicke listened carefully to Penzias and made several comments. After hanging up, he turned to his colleagues and said: “Guys, we got ahead of ourselves.”

Nearly 15 years later, after many measurements made at a variety of wavelengths by many groups of astronomers confirmed that the radiation they discovered was indeed a relic echo of the Big Bang, having a temperature of 2.712 K, Penzias and Wilson shared the Nobel Prize for their invention. Although at first they did not even want to write an article about their discovery, because they considered it untenable and did not fit into the model of a stationary Universe that they adhered to!

It is said that Penzias and Wilson would have considered it sufficient to be mentioned as the fifth and sixth names on the list after Dicke, Peebles, Roll and Wilkinson. In this case Nobel Prize, apparently, Dicke would have left. But everything happened the way it happened.

P.S.: Subscribe to our newsletter. Once every two weeks we will send 10 of the most interesting and useful materials from the MYTH blog.

Our Galaxy - the Milky Way - belongs to the so-called spiral-type galaxies (S - Galaxies), which are a rotating disk of hydrogen gas, dust and stars with pronounced spiral arms (Fig. 1.6). This is a complex astronomical object, consisting of a core, a thickening in the central part - a bulge (from the English word “buldge”), a halo and the disk itself (Fig. 1.7). The dense core at the center of the disk contains mostly old stars and is free of gas and dust. At the heart of our Galaxy lies black hole ( Black holes are beautifully described in the book by A.M. Cherepashchuk “Black holes”).
Recently, the orbiting Chandra X-ray observatory recorded a powerful X-ray flare in the center of the Galaxy, which made it possible to determine the size of the black hole - no more than the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
The Galaxy's disk is filled with gas, dust and mainly young stars. The diameter of the disk is about 30,000 parsecs (Pc), the bulge is 8,000 Pc. Almost all the stars and most of the gas and dust matter are concentrated in the spiral arms of the disk.
The disk is surrounded by a spherical halo. Its size is an order of magnitude greater than the transverse size of the disk. The halo contains rare stars and clusters of stars - clusters numbering many hundreds of thousands of stars. In addition, Halo has dark matter(“dark matter”), which was identified by gravitational effects. Dark matter increases the mass of the Galaxy by at least several times.
The Sun, the closest star to us, is located in the Orion spiral at a distance of ~25,000 Pc from the center of our galaxy. The Sun is a relatively young star - it is 5 billion years old. The Milky Way is at least twice as old as the Sun: star clusters may be 10 billion years old.
The total number of stars in the Galaxy disk is 10 11 (one hundred billion). In addition to stars, the Galaxy also includes the interstellar medium. The main component of the interstellar medium is interstellar gas, consisting mainly (~90%) of hydrogen and interstellar dust (~1%). The interstellar medium contains magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation. The galaxy rotates differentially: at the periphery, its rotation speed is less than in the central regions. Our circulation period solar system around the center of the Galaxy is approximately 200 million years. Let's remember this number. We will return to it later.
The average density of interstellar matter in the disk is estimated as 10 -24 g/cm 3 (roughly 1 hydrogen atom per cm 3). There are large deviations from this value: these are dense clouds, up to tens of parsecs long, with densities ranging from 100 to 1000 atoms/cm 3 .
Matter found in the Galaxy in an atomic state under the influence of ultraviolet radiation stars ionized(neutral atoms “lose” their electron shells). For example, up to 90% of hydrogen consists of it ions– protons.
The mass of the entire Universe, and these are optically bright stars, interstellar dust and gas, molecular clouds, planets, is concentrated in protons and neutrons (85% are protons, and 15% are neutrons). Neutrons, being an unstable particle, exist only inside nuclei. All this makes up the so-called baryonic matter.

Let us now turn to the problem of quantitative relationships between various forms of matter in the modern Universe. In Fig. 1.8 answers this question. The answer is according to the level of our knowledge today. From the diagram shown in Fig. 1.8, it is clear that only a few percent (about 4%) of the composition of the Universe belongs to what we believe our world is formed from. This is baryonic matter. Everything else, and this is almost 96%, is dark matter and dark energy – the material substances of the Universe are still poorly understood for us. We know that they definitely exist. But we don't know what it is. We only build hypotheses and try to conduct experiments in the hope of proving their validity. But the fact remains that we do not yet have arguments in favor of the final choice of hypothesis that explains the composition of dark matter and dark energy in the Universe.
Dark energy, according to modern views, is precisely the force that causes the Universe to expand. If gravity, which is familiar to us, causes bodies to attract each other, then dark energy is rather antigravity, contributing to the scattering of bodies in the Universe. Apparently, immediately after the Big Bang, the expansion of the Universe slowed down, but after that “dark energy” overcame gravity and acceleration began again - the expansion of the Universe. This is not a hypothesis, but an experimental fact discovered from radiation redshift - reducing the brightness of distant supernovas: They are brighter than they should be from the picture of the slowing expansion of the Universe. The “red shift” effect - an increase in the wavelength of the spectrum of the observed source recorded by the observer (which is why stars appear brighter) - is one of the remarkable experimental astronomical facts. The cosmological “red shift” of observed galaxies was predicted by A. Einstein and is to this day one of the convincing evidence of the expanding Universe.
Plunging into the era of early cosmology, we can remember that it was the great A. Einstein, trying to preserve the static nature of the Universe, who introduced, which became historical, a cosmological constant - balancing the forces of attraction of celestial bodies. But following the discovery of the “red shift,” he removed the constant from his equations. Apparently, A. Einstein was wrong in rejecting it: After all, this is the dark energy that intrigues modern astrophysicists.
It is not clear whether humanity is lucky or unlucky, but it lives in a period in the development of the Universe when dark energy prevails, promoting expansion. But this process is probably not eternal, and after a period of time comparable to the age of the Universe (10-20 billion years), history may reverse itself - our world will begin to shrink. Whether or not the moment of the Big Collapse - an alternative to the Big Bang - will occur is, of course, a big question in modern cosmology.
Scientists have been able to prove the existence of an expanding Universe - this is the red shift of the optical radiation of the Galaxy and relict electromagnetic radiation - relict photons, which will be discussed below. Perhaps in the future scientists will be able to establish the existence of “harbingers” of the impending compression of the Universe.
Another experimental fact - the study of the deviation of light from distant galaxies in the gravitational fields of the Universe - led astrophysicists to the conclusion about the existence of hidden - dark matter - somewhere near us. It is this dark matter that alters the paths of light rays by a greater amount than would be expected in the presence of only visible nearby galaxies. Scientists studied the distribution on starry sky over 50,000 galaxies in an attempt to build a spatial model of the structure of dark matter. All the results obtained inexorably testify in favor of its existence, and the Universe is basically dark matter. Modern estimates indicate a value of about 80%. Here we repeat again - we do not know what particles this dark matter consists of. Scientists only assume that it consists of two parts: some unknown exotic massive particles and physical vacuum.
We will return to this problem later, but for now we will turn again to the form of matter that is familiar to us, consisting of baryons (protons and neutrons) and electrons - “baryonic matter”. We know much more about her. Over more than a hundred-year period in the history of the development of physics - from the discovery of elementary particles and the structure of the atom to the results of research in this area, as well as in astrophysics, science has received at its disposal many new results about the structure of matter familiar to us.

NASA astrophysicists did something important scientific discovery– they experimentally confirmed the inflationary theory of the evolution of the Universe.

Scientists are convinced that they “touched” events approximately 14,000,000,000 years ago. After three years of continuous observations of the cosmic background in the microwave range, they were able to “catch” the light remaining (relict) from the first moments of the life of the Universe. These discoveries were made using the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) apparatus.

Astrophysicists study the Universe at that moment in its existence, when its age was about one trillionth of a second, that is, almost immediately after the Big Bang. It was at this moment that the beginnings of future hundreds of millions of galaxies appeared in the tiny Universe, from which stars and planets subsequently formed over hundreds of millions of years.

The leading postulate of the inflationary theory is this: after the Big Bang, which gave rise to our Universe, in an incredibly short period of time - a trillionth of a second - it turned from a microscopic object into something colossal, many times larger than the entire observable part of space, that is, it underwent inflation.

“The results are in favor of inflation,” said Charles Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), who reported the discovery. "It's amazing that we can say anything at all about what happened in the first trillionth of a second of the universe's existence," he said.

Apparently, in the first trillionths of a second after the Explosion, the expansion rate of the Universe was higher than the speed of light, and the time that passed from the moment the Universe expanded from the size of several atoms to a stable spherical shape is measured in very small quantities. This hypothesis was first put forward in the 80s.

“How do we know what was in the Universe at the time of its creation? The cosmic microwave background is a real treasure trove of information about the past of our Universe. The light radiation that has reached us clearly indicates the facts of the development of the Universe,” says Dr. Gary Hinshaw, employee NASA Goddard Space Center.

Herself inflation theory exists in several versions, astronomer Nikolai Nikolaevich Chugai (Institute of Astronomy RAS) tells NewsInfo.

“There is no complete theory of this, but there are only some assumptions about how this happened. But there is one “prediction” that follows from the fact that quantum fluctuations (from the Latin fluctuatio - fluctuation; random deviations physical quantities from their average values ​​on microscopic scales) predict a certain spectrum of disturbances, that is, the distribution of the amplitude of these disturbances depending on the length of the scale on which this disturbance develops. You can imagine in the figure a wavy line with different wavelengths, and if you have one amplitude for large-scale waves, and another for small-scale ones, you say that the spectrum of these disturbances is not flat,” explains Nikolai Chugai.

Until about the 1970s of the 20th century, there was a standard picture of the Big Bang, according to which our Universe arose from a very dense, hot state. Thermonuclear fusion of helium has occurred - this is one of the confirmations of the model of a hot Universe. In 1964, relict (residual) radiation was discovered, for which the Nobel Prize was received. CMB radiation comes to us from very distant regions. During the expansion process, the radiation filling big Universe, is cooling down.

"This property is similar to when balloon bursts and becomes cold,” explains Nikolai Chugai. “The same thing happens when the spray comes out of your can and you can feel the can getting cold.”

“The discovery of this radiation (it is now cold - only 3 degrees) was decisive evidence of the hot phase of the Universe. But this model is not complete,” says the astronomer. “It does not explain everything. And the main thing is that it does not explain the fact that the Universe is homogeneous on all scales. Wherever we look, we see almost identical galaxies with the same density of these galaxies in units of volume. Everywhere it is approximately the same structure. Since these distant points of the Universe do not interact, it turns out strange - from the point of view of a physicist - how are they do not interact and know nothing about each other, relatively speaking? And, nevertheless, the Universe is structured in the same way at these distant points. And this should mean for a physicist that once these distant parts of the Universe were in contact. That is, they "were part of a whole in which disturbances spread and these disturbances were smoothed out. That is, once the universe that we see now on large scales was physically unified - signals and disturbances from these distant points managed to pass through and smear the disturbances that arose there."

Today we observe precisely this homogeneity in distant points of the Universe in opposite regions of the sky as completely identical in density - relict radiation, which we observe with absolutely the same intensity and brightness. "No matter where you look," says Dr. Chugai.

“And this means that the Universe was absolutely homogeneous - isotropic. This initial inflationary stage allows us to “prepare” such a homogeneous universe. Another advantage of the inflationary phase is not only that it prepared a homogeneous universe, but also that so-called quantum fluctuations (perturbation of density on microscopic length scales) were associated with the quantum nature of our world (at the level of elementary particles),” concluded Nikolai Chugai.

Listen to the sounds of a simulated Big Bang.

Materials used in the article:

2.Ringside Seat to the Universe's First Split Second 3.Russian media

They say that time is the most mysterious matter. No matter how much a person tries to understand its laws and learn to control them, he always gets into trouble. Doing last step to unraveling the great mystery, and considering that it is practically already in our pocket, we are each time convinced that it is still just as elusive. However, man is an inquisitive creature and the search for answers to eternal questions for many becomes the meaning of life.

One of these secrets was the creation of the world. Followers of the “Big Bang Theory,” which logically explains the origin of life on Earth, began to wonder what happened before the Big Bang, and whether there was anything at all. The topic for research is fertile, and the results may be of interest to the general public.

Everything in the world has a past - the Sun, the Earth, the Universe, but where did all this diversity come from and what came before it?

It is hardly possible to give a definite answer, but it is quite possible to put forward hypotheses and look for evidence for them. In search of the truth, researchers have received not one, but several answers to the question “what happened before the Big Bang?” The most popular of them sounds somewhat discouraging and quite bold - Nothing. Is it possible that everything that exists came from nothing? That Nothing gave birth to everything that exists?

Actually, this cannot be called absolute emptiness and are there still some processes going on there? Was everything born from nothing? Nothingness is the complete absence of not only matter, molecules and atoms, but even time and space. Rich soil for the activity of science fiction writers!

Scientists' opinions about the era before the Big Bang

However, Nothing cannot be touched, ordinary laws do not apply to it, which means you either speculate and build theories, or try to create conditions close to those that resulted in the Big Bang and make sure your assumptions are correct. In special chambers from which particles of matter were removed, the temperature was lowered, bringing it closer to space conditions. The observational results provided indirect confirmation of scientific theories: scientists studied the environment in which the Big Bang could theoretically arise, but calling this environment “Nothing” turned out to be not entirely correct. The mini-explosions that occur could lead to a larger explosion that gave birth to the Universe.

Theories of universes before the Big Bang

Adherents of another theory argue that before the Big Bang there were two other Universes that developed according to their own laws. What exactly they were is difficult to answer, but according to the theory put forward, the Big Bang occurred as a result of their collision and led to the complete destruction of the previous Universes and, at the same time, to the birth of ours, which exists today.

The “compression” theory says that the Universe exists and has always existed; only the conditions of its development change, which lead to the disappearance of life in one region and the emergence in another. Life disappears as a result of the “collapse” and appears after the explosion. No matter how paradoxical it may sound. This hypothesis has a large number of supporters.

There is another assumption: as a result of the Big Bang, a new Universe arose from nothingness and inflated, as if soap bubble, to gigantic proportions. At this time, “bubbles” budded from it, which later became other Galaxies and Universes.

The theory of "natural selection" suggests that we're talking about about “natural cosmic selection”, like the one Darwin talked about, only on a larger scale. Our Universe had its own ancestor, and it, in turn, also had its own ancestor. According to this theory, our Universe was created by a Black Hole. and are of great interest to scientists. According to this theory, in order for a new Universe to appear, “reproduction” mechanisms are necessary. The Black Hole becomes such a mechanism.

Or maybe those who believe that as our Universe grows and develops is expanding, heading towards the Big Bang, which will be the beginning of a new Universe, are right. This means that once upon a time, an unknown and, alas, disappeared Universe became the progenitor of our new universe. The cyclical nature of this system looks logical and this theory has many adherents.

It is difficult to say to what extent the followers of this or that hypothesis came close to the truth. Everyone chooses what is closer in spirit and understanding. Religious world gives his answers to all questions and puts the picture of the creation of the world into a divine framework. Atheists are looking for answers, trying to get to the bottom of things and touch this very essence with their own hands. One may wonder what caused such persistence in searching for an answer to the question of what happened before the Big Bang, because it is quite problematic to derive practical benefit from this knowledge: a person will not become the ruler of the Universe, according to his word and desire, new stars will not light up and existing ones will not go out . But what is so interesting is what has not been studied! Humanity is struggling to solve mysteries, and who knows, maybe sooner or later they will fall into man’s hands. That's just how he is with these secret knowledge will he use it?

Illustrations: KLAUS BACHMANN, GEO magazine

(25 votes, average: 4,84 out of 5)