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A ten-question quiz, a short stepper through the early universe, and a myth-or-fact set. The answers follow the sources used on this site.
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John Mather, in a NASA Q&A, says the name Big Bang is:
According to that same Q&A, the Big Bang:
Several of the pages we checked give the age of the universe as 13.8 billion years. NASA’s WMAP overview says:
A NASA Hubble page, a Physics of the Cosmos page, and Mather’s Q&A put the cosmic microwave background at about:
Helium, a NASA Hubble page says, comprises roughly:
The leftover glow was discovered in 1965 by:
About the physical process behind inflation, a NASA Physics of the Cosmos page says:
NASA’s WMAP overview gives a census, today, of about:
Scientists have yet to determine, Britannica’s big-bang model article says:
The first stars, a NASA overview says, were:
A short path through the early universe
A fraction of a second: cosmic inflation, a rapid expansion. We do not know what triggered it.
About one second: the rapid expansion slowed. The universe was a hot, uniform soup of subatomic particles and light.
A few seconds, in Britannica, or a few minutes, on a NASA Hubble page: the first nuclei of hydrogen, helium and lithium form.
About 380,000 years (375,000 in WMAP wording): atoms form, and the leftover heat still fills the sky as the cosmic microwave background.
1965: Penzias and Wilson discover that leftover glow, by accident. COBE, WMAP and Planck later map it in detail.
Today: an expanding universe, about 13.8 billion years old in several sources, or 13.77 in NASA’s WMAP wording, with the expansion now speeding up.