• Question: what is the big bang?

    Asked by SAYr9 to Ellen, Elliot, Hazel, Rupesh, Thomas on 11 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Thomas Biggans

      Thomas Biggans answered on 11 Jun 2016:

      The Big Bang is the moment at which the universe was created. Before it there was nothing, no stuff but there was also no space to put any stuff in. So it wasn’t all black, it wasn’t all white there was just nothing, I find it quite a hard thing to think of.

      Then the big bang happens and space is created and this space is a sphere which gets bigger and bigger in fact this sphere which is our universe is still getting bigger today and it’s getting bigger faster than ever before. Within this sphere some very simple stuff called hydrogen was made the hydrogen atoms banged into each other and made helium. Things kept banging into each other to make more and more different kinds of stuff.

      We have lots of evidence that the big bang happened, what we don’t know is what caused the big bang?

    • Photo: Hazel Garvie-Cook

      Hazel Garvie-Cook answered on 16 Jun 2016:

      The big bang is a theory which explains the evolution of our whole universe, from it’s start as a very dense and very hot state to how we see it now. People are still trying to work out what happened at the very start of our universe, but it’s thought that the universe expanded really quickly and cooled down.
      The idea that we know what happened so soon after the formation of the universe is really cool. It was around 14 billion years ago! Scientists are still looking at the universe we see today, how it’s changing and what it contains, to work out what happened in its first stages.

Comments