δA² Sidereal time

The Big Bang

14 billion years ago...

13 billion 820 million years ago, the universe burst forth, freeing space and time: it was the Big Bang.

During the first 380,000 years, the universe remained opaque: no photograph, therefore, can bear witness to these first moments, in the sense of capturing photons.

The capture of other particles (neutrinos, gravitons) will perhaps one day allow us to go back before the first 380,000 years of the universe, to the first seconds of creation...

And before the Big Bang? the models vary between nothingness, the meeting of a brane and an anti-brane, the implosion of a black hole from a pre-existing universe or other hypotheses...

Between these theories and what we currently measure...
... there is no photo!

From 0 to 10^-43seconds: the Planck era

It's the first ten-millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second!
The universe is a hundred billion billion times smaller than an electron, which does not yet exist.
The laws of physics as we know them do not apply: space and time are agitated by violent fluctuations in an unpredictable "quantum foam".

The first hundred thousandth of a second: sudden expansion of the universe and appearance of particles

Gravitation appears, then nuclear and electro-magnetic forces: elementary particles are created (quarks, electrons)
This is the era of inflation: the size of the universe grows by almost a billion billion billion billion times in one ten-thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second to reach a few centimeters in diameter.
This is the era of particles: the universe is then a soup of quarks bathing with electrons in a newly appeared electromagnetic field.

The first second: formation of the constituents of the atom (protons and neutrons)

The universe is now hundreds of billions of kilometers in radius.
As it continued to expand, the universe cooled: quarks can then group together to form protons and neutrons.
Matter and anti-matter end up annihilating: only the billionth of particles of matter remain which were in excess compared to anti-matter and which constitute the current world.

The first three minutes: nucleo-synthesis - the nuclei of the first atoms

From one second to three minutes after the Big Bang, the first atomic nuclei are formed
The size of the universe has now reached around ten light years (about one hundred thousand billion kilometers)

The first 380,000 years: the opaque universe - the first atoms

The universe continues to cool as it expands but the photons see their courses constantly stopped by multiple collisions: the light is trapped, the universe remains opaque
Little by little, the atomic nuclei capture electrons to form hydrogen atoms as well as a little helium.
Photons can now move smoothly: the universe is gradually becoming transparent