{"id":4880,"date":"2025-06-22T09:33:14","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T09:33:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/4880\/"},"modified":"2025-06-22T09:33:14","modified_gmt":"2025-06-22T09:33:14","slug":"how-could-an-explosive-big-bang-be-the-birth-of-our-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/4880\/","title":{"rendered":"How could an explosive Big Bang be the birth of our universe?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Curious Kids<\/a> is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you\u2019d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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How can a Big Bang have been the start of the universe, since intense explosions destroy everything? \u2013 Tristan S., age 8, Newark, Delaware<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Pretend you\u2019re a perfectly flat chess piece in a game of chess on a perfectly flat and humongous chessboard. One day you look around and ask: How did I get here? How did the chessboard get here? How did it all start? You pull out your telescope and begin to explore your universe, the chessboard\u2026.<\/p>\n

What do you find? Your universe, the chessboard, is getting bigger. And over more time, even bigger! The board is expanding in all directions that you can see. There\u2019s nothing that seems to be causing this expansion as far as you can tell \u2013 it just seems to be the nature of the chessboard.<\/p>\n

But wait a minute. If it\u2019s getting bigger, and has been getting bigger and bigger, then that means in the past, it must have been smaller and smaller and smaller. At some time, long, long ago, at the very beginning, it must have been so small that it was infinitely small.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s work forward from what happened then. At the beginning of your universe, the chessboard was infinitely tiny and then expanded, growing bigger and bigger until the day that you decided to make some observations about the nature of your chess universe. All the stuff in the universe \u2013 the little particles that make up you and everything else \u2013 started very close together and then spread farther apart as time went on.<\/p>\n

Our universe works exactly the same way. When astronomers like me<\/a> make observations of distant galaxies, we see that they are all moving apart<\/a>. It seems our universe started very small and has been expanding ever since. In fact, scientists now know that not only is the universe expanding, but the speed at which it\u2019s expanding is increasing<\/a>. This mysterious effect is caused by something physicists call dark energy, though we know very little else about it.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Astronomers also observe something called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation<\/a>. It\u2019s a very low level of energy that exists all throughout space. We know from those measurements<\/a> that our universe is 13.8 billion years old<\/a> \u2013 way, way older than people, and about three times older than the Earth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If astronomers look back all the way to the event that started our universe, we call that the Big Bang<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Many people hear the name \u201cBig Bang\u201d and think about a giant explosion of stuff, like a bomb going off. But the Big Bang wasn\u2019t an explosion that destroyed things. It was the beginning of our universe, the start of both space and time. Rather than an explosion, it was a very rapid expansion, the event that started the universe growing bigger and bigger.<\/p>\n

This expansion is different than an explosion, which can be caused by things like chemical reactions or large impacts. Explosions result in energy going from one place to another, and usually a lot of it. Instead, during the Big Bang, energy moved along with space as it expanded, moving around wildly but becoming more spread out over time since space was growing over time.<\/p>\n

Back in the chessboard universe, the \u201cBig Bang\u201d would be like the beginning of everything. It\u2019s the start of the board getting bigger.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to realize that \u201cbefore\u201d the Big Bang, there was no space and there was no time. Coming back to the chessboard analogy, you can count the amount of time on the game clock after the start but there is no game time before the start \u2013 the clock wasn\u2019t running. And, before the game had started, the chessboard universe hadn\u2019t existed and there was no chessboard space either. You have to be careful when you say \u201cbefore\u201d in this context because time didn\u2019t even exist until the Big Bang.<\/p>\n

You also have wrap your mind around the idea that the universe isn\u2019t expanding \u201cinto\u201d anything, since as far as we know the Big Bang was the start of both space and time<\/a>. Confusing, I know!<\/p>\n

Astronomers aren\u2019t sure what caused the Big Bang. We just look at observations and see that\u2019s how the universe did start. We know it was extremely small and got bigger, and we know that kicked off 13.8 billion years ago.<\/p>\n

What started our own game of chess? That\u2019s one of the deepest questions anyone can ask.<\/p>\n

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you\u2019d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com<\/a>. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.<\/p>\n

And since curiosity has no age limit \u2013 adults, let us know what you\u2019re wondering, too. We won\u2019t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.<\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a>, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Michael Lam<\/a>, Rochester Institute of Technology<\/a> <\/p>\n

Read more:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Michael Lam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you\u2019d like an…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[6355,159,783,6354,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-4880","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-our-universe","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-space","11":"tag-the-universe","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114726332472184300","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}