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How did the Universe come to be?                       An easy essay                                                                                                              by Rick Costello                                                      

   How did the Universe begin? Why is it here?  How did the sky fill with stars?  What made the stars?  How did the planets get here? Where does water come from?  Where did life come from?  Where did plants and animals come from? And finally where did we come from?  How did we get here? 

  All these questions have been asked down the ages from Carl Sagan to Edwin Hubble, to Galileo, to Bruno, to Capernicus, to Arostotle, to early Romans, to early Greeks, to early Egyptians, to Babylon, to Mesopotamia, to the Upper Paleolithic, to the Stone Age, to before recorded history of Man, when early Man wondered the savanna’s in family groups following the other animals, their food source, as lions and cheetahs do today.

  In the last 100 years but especially the last 40 years with new technologies in computers and stronger telescopes using a wide variety of different light waves including normal visual light, infrared, and X-ray light to name a few, we have peered farther from our home than at any time in the history of mankind.  The knowledge of how the Universe came to be as it is today is coming in faster than we can discern it. The thing about the Universe is the laws of nature apply everywhere and to everything and in the Universe. The laws of nature that apply in this galaxy that our star the Sun and planets are in, are the same laws of nature that apply to a star and planet in a galaxy 13 billion light years away from us or any of the 500 billion other galaxies in the Universe. 

  But how did all the stars, planets, comets, asteroids and all the other galaxies get here in the first place? If there was once nothing anywhere, no life, no planets, no stars, no space and no time, where did it all come from? How did this great Universe come from nothing. If you think about it, it sounds impossible for something  as huge as all the matter in the Universe to come from nothing, but come from nothing is where it came from.

  What caused the Big Bang?  We don’t know and we may never know.  But the Big Bang happened. If someone tells you it didn’t happen that it’s just a theory, tell them, in science the word “theory” means “I dare anyone to prove it wrong.”  Science, is looking at something without any prejudices and figuring out exactly what that something is and how exactly it came to be.  We know the Big Bang happened because all the galaxy groups are moving away from each other. If we could run the Universe in reverse, all the galaxies would collide with each other at a single point. Also the heat from the Big Bang is still detectible today, what is called the “Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.” We don’t know what caused the Big Bang but we know what happened a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

   When the Big Bang happened it was not an explosion as say a stick of dynamite would be.  It was an explosion of space and with the beginning of space, the beginning of time.   Time in our Universe began between 13.7 and 15 billion years ago.

   Where did matter come from?

  The explosion of space caused a tremendous amount of heat from the burst of radiation at the moment of the Big Bang and this heat created electrons, protons, neutrons, photons and neutrinos,.  Electrons, protons and neutrons if broken down are made of nothing. 700,000 years later, the heat from the Big Bang cooled to a temperature that forced the electrons protons and neutrons to combine with each other and when they did they made hydrogen atoms.  The expanding Universe was filled with huge amounts of hydrogen atoms.

  With the early Universe filled with hydrogen atoms, gravity took over and began to separate the hydrogen into different groups, about 200 billion separate groups of hydrogen atoms, each thousands of light years across to hundreds of thousands of light years across (in 1 year, a beam of light travels 6 trillion miles. 1 light year is a measure of distance equal to 6 trillion miles).  These groups of atoms are the beginnings of the galaxies.

  Within these great groups of hydrogen atoms, gravity again took over and the atoms begin to rotate around the center of these galaxies of hydrogen atoms. As the atoms rotated around the center, they began to bump into each other and stick together and become larger and larger as gravity pulls in more atoms. The more atoms that stick together, the larger they get and the more gravity these balls of hydrogen atoms have to pull in more atoms. In as short as 100,000 years these balls of hydrogen atoms can have enough mass for the pressure in the center of the balls of atoms to create enough heat to begin nuclear fusion and the balls ignite into a  star. When a proton of hydrogen combines with another hydrogen proton it makes the second element, helium.  Also when two hydrogen atoms combine it makes one photon of light, and the star shines. Our star turns 400,000 tons of hydrogen atoms into helium every second. There was now for the first time light in the Universe. 

  Every star in the night sky that we can see, is a star in our galaxy which we named The Milky Way. In our galaxy there are 100 to 400 billion stars.  Every star was made by collecting hydrogen atoms until they are large enough with enough heat built up from pressure at the center to begin nuclear fusion and the star shines.  The same happened in all  200 billion other galaxies in the Universe. We have seen through our telescopes galaxies with over a trillion stars in them.

  If you could swim miles under water you would find yourself being crushed by the weight of the water on top of you. The same is happening at the center of stars.  With a star like our Sun, at the center there is enough pressure to build up enough heat to combine the hydrogen atoms to make helium atoms and some lithium the third element .  An atom with 2 protons (one from each of the combining hydrogen atoms) is a helium atom. Three protons will make a lithium atom. The Sun has enough pressure and heat in its interior to make helium and the third element with 3 protons, lithium.

  The Sun and the matter that make up the solar system (the Sun, our star = solar, the planets, asteroids and comets = system) were not made from the hydrogen from the Big Bang.  The matter that made the Sun and planets was made in two long gone stars that lived their lives and blew their masses into space. Our star is a third generation star

  These two stars had much more mass than our star.  Inside these giant stars, the pressure and heat were so great that in the center, the hydrogen atoms were creating more elements than the helium and lithium that the Sun is capable of making. Inside these stars the pressure was combining hydrogen atoms into elements like silicone, iron, magnesium and oxygen, the elements that make up the Earth and planets and elements like Nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen, the elements for making life.  That’s right, all the elements for everything, are made in the centers of stars.  Every atom in your body was once in the inside of a star where it was made through nuclear fusion.

  The heat and pressure at the center of these large mass stars, is great enough to combine atoms until the element iron is made.  To make the higher elements above iron a greater amount of heat is needed. This temperature is reached in what is known as a Super Nova.

  The first of the two stars that made our star and planets lived it’s life and then exploded in a super nova that spread it’s matter into space only to be pulled back together by the forces of gravity to make new stars with heavier elements, made inside the star. The second star formed from the atoms of the first star lived it’s life and made more heavier elements before ending it’s life in another super nova explosion. The elements of gas and dust expelled into space from this second star eventually because of gravity coalesced into the Sun, Earth, Moon and planets. When it was made. the Earth had all the ingredients for making life. It only had to wait for the conditions to be right for life to begin and for that life to be able to survive.  It seems that the Earth was a billion and a half years old when the conditions were right and life took hold creating the first one celled living thing. It took another 3 1/2 billion years of evolution to create the plants and animals alive today including ourselves, the human species.  We are made of star stuff.  We are the Universe that is alive with intelligence.  We are the Universe that can look at itself and change the Universe. Not only are we part of the Universe, we are the Universe. Remember to look up.                                                                                                               Rick Costello