Big Bang tagged posts

After its “birth” in the Big Bang, the universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a few helium atoms. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. More-or-less all elements heavier than helium were produced in the 13.8 billion years between the Big Bang and the present day.

Stars have produced many of these heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion. However, this only makes elements as heavy as iron. The creation of any heavier elements would consume energy instead of releasing it.

In order to explain the presence of these heavier elements today, it’s necessary to find phenomena that can produce them. One type of event that fits the bill is a gamma-ray burst (GRB)—the most powerful class of explosion in the universe...

New insights on how galaxies are formed
Astronomers can use supercomputers to simulate the formation of galaxies from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to the present day. But there are a number of sources of error. An international research team, led by researchers in Lund, has spent a hundred million computer hours over eight years trying to correct these.

The last decade has seen major advances in computer simulations that can realistically calculate how galaxies form...

Scientists have discovered the oldest black hole yet, a cosmic beast formed a mere 470 million years after the Big Bang. The findings, published Monday, confirm what until now were theories that supermassive black holes existed at the dawn of the universe. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory teamed up over the past year to make the observations.

Given the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that puts the age of this black hole at 13.2 billion years.

Even...

Scientists have for the first time observed the early universe running in extreme slow motion, unlocking one of the mysteries of Einstein’s expanding universe. The research is published in Nature Astronomy.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant—and hence ancient—universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as “clocks.”

“Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower,” said lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney.

“If you were there, in...