KNOWING THE UNIVERSE

History and Philosophy of Astronomy

Chris Impey, Distinguished Professor

University of Arizona
History and Philosophy of Astronomy

Module 12 : Big Bang

 Space
Science is Seeing
 A Scale Model

Set the Earth

to the size of
= a walnut, or a
1:10,000,000
scale model

• The Moon is a pea at arm’s length

• The Sun is a 3 m ball 100 m away
• Neptune is another pea 2 km away
• The nearest star is 50,000 km away
 And at this scale,
light is reduced to
very slow walking
speed. There’s no
way information in
the universe can
travel any faster

• The Moon is a seconds walk away

• The Sun is 8 minutes walk away
• 10 hours to walk the Solar System
• A year to walk to the nearest stars
Reduce the scale by a factor of 100,000,000

• The Solar System is a grain of sand

• The distance between stars is 10 m
• The Milky Way is the size of the U.S.
• The MW has 100,000,000,000 stars
Now reduce by another factor of 100,000,000

• The Milky Way is the size of a plate

• The nearest galaxy is 10 m away
• The universe is the size of the U.S.
• Billions of galaxies within this space
 How Empty?

A one-inch cube
of the air you’re
breathing holds
1020 atoms in it

The average density of the universe is 1022

times lower, about 1 atom per cubic meter
 For an idea of the true
density of the universe,
imagine the 1-inch cube
of air stretched upwards

…all the way to

the Andomeda
galaxy (M31)
Old Light
 Lookback Time

If the speed of light were infinite, light from

everywhere in the universe would reach us
at exactly the same time and we would see
the entire universe as it is now.

But it is not, so we see distant

regions as they were in the past.
 How can we know what the universe was like in the past?
• Light travels at a finite speed (300,000 km/s)

Destination Light travel time

Moon 1 second
Sun 8 minutes
Sirius 8 years
Andromeda (M31) 2.5 million years
• Telescopes are like time machines!
• We see objects as they were in the past

The farther away we look in distance,

the further back we also look in time.
LOOKBACK TIME

Nearby “Now”

“Recent” Stars

“Long Ago” Galaxies

“Ancient” Universe
An ultra-faint galaxy seen when the universe was 500
million years old, or a lookback time of 13 billion years
The Contents
 Atoms

1080

Almost all the simple elements hydrogen and helium

 Photons

1089

A billion photons for every particle

 Stars

The Milky Way is typical with 400 billion stars

 Galaxies

Scattered in a universe 46 billion light years across

Ultra-Deep Field Pan
 Mediocrity

We therefore live on an:

• Average planet orbiting

• An middle-aged star in a
• Very typical galaxy in an
• Unremarkable region of an
• Extremely large universe

Copernicus
We’re not even made from the
stuff that the universe is mostly
made of. Most of the universe is
composed of enigmatic dark
matter and dark energy. Atoms
are 4% of the cosmic pie chart,
and carbon and the other heavy
elements that are essential for
life are < 0.1% of the cosmos.
WE’RE NOT SPECIAL

Us

Universe
Insignificance Song
Big Bang
 Evidence for the Big Bang

1. Redshift – it’s a cosmic

3C 273

expansion of space-time,
not a Doppler shift.

2. The cosmic microwave

background radiation
(CMB), a signal that is
smooth to one part in
100,000 and close to
perfectly thermal, at a
temperature of 2.73K.
3. Deuterium and Helium
synthesized (much higher
temperatures in the past). Hubble Ultra Deep Field
HST•ACS

4. Galaxies in the distant past

look younger (smaller and
more irregular), they evolve.
© 2005 Pearson Education Inc., publishing as Addison-
Wesley
 Status of the Model

• A good scientific model should always make

predictions which can be verified.
• The big bang model makes two predictions
which have been verified since the 1960s:
• the existence and characteristics of the cosmic
microwave background (CMB)
• the expected Helium abundance in the Universe
• The model predictions agree with all current
observations. There is much indirect evidence
the universe was smaller and hotter in the past
 Cosmic Helium Abundance
• In the Era of Nucleosynthesis
• number of p+ and n roughly equal as long as T > 1011 K
• below 1011 K, proton-to-neutron reactions no longer occur
• neutrons still decay into protons
• protons begin to outnumber neutrons
• At T < 1010 K, He, Deuterium, and Li remain stable
– At this time, big bang model predicts a 7-to-1 p+-to-n ratio.
• For every 2 n and 2 p+ which fused
into a Helium nucleus…
• there are 12 p+
• Model predicts a 3-to-1 H:He
• This what we observe:
• minimum of 25% He in all galaxies
 Microwave Background
There is evidence for expansion, and
the universe was hotter and denser in
the distant past.

The microwave background and the

helium abundance cannot easily be
explained in any other way.

There are hundred of thousands of

big bang photons in every breath you
take: the big bang is all around us.

It is a theory, but a theory with a web

of evidence to support it. The theory
is mute about a cause of the big bang.
 Cosmic Microwave Background

• The universe is immersed in a sea of radiation.

• 380,000 years after the big bang, the universe had
cooled enough for free electrons to become bound
into atoms of Hydrogen and Helium
• Without electrons to scatter them, photons were
able to travel unhindered throughout the universe
• The universe became transparent
• The temperature of the universe was 3,000 K at this
time, similar to a stellar photosphere
• It has expanded by a factor of 1000 since then,
reducing the temperature to 3000/1000 = 3 Kelvin
When we look at the
CMB, we look at the
surface of the glowing
“fog” that filled the
entire early universe!

The CMB has highest

redshift of anything
we can see (z = 1000).
It comes from a time
400,000 years after
the big bang, when
the universe was 1000
times smaller & hotter
and one billion times
denser than it is now.
1% of the specks
on any TV tuned
between stations
are interactions
with the big bang
Space is Flat
 Horizons

The Earth has a horizon: we can’t see past

it because of the Earth’s curved surface.

A black hole has an event horizon: we can’t

see into it because photons cannot escape.

The universe has a cosmological horizon:

beyond that, photons haven’t had time to
reach us in 13.8 billion years since the BB.
Light travels simply and directly in the local universe.

But early expansion of the universe carried any two

points away from each other faster than light speed.
Distant galaxies are only just becoming visible now.

PHYSICAL UNIVERSE >> OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE!

 Cosmic Inflation

The standard big bang has trouble explaining why the universe
is as smooth and flat as it is, leading to the idea of an epoch of
extremely rapid inflation, just 10-35 sec after the big bang. The
mechanism is unclear but probably associated with the Grand
Unified theories that seek to unite all the forces except gravity.
Status of Inflation
Inflation makes the universe flat
and smooth (by design!), and it
implies vast region of space that
are beyond view. It has tentative
support from CMB satellite data.
Further and crucial tests of
the inflation idea require a
way to observe gravitational
waves that the exponential
expansion imprinted on the
radiation from the big bang.
That means very sensitive
and difficult observations of
the polarization of the CMB.
A false alarm detection was
claimed in 2018 and had to
be retracted. New satellites
and telescopes are currently
being built to do this test.
 Beyond the Horizon
The universe is bounded in time
and not space. General relativity
sets no speed limit to the rate of
expansion. As time goes by, ever
more distant regions come into
view. No limit to space is seen.
At z = 1.3, an object was moving
away from us at c at the time the
light was emitted.
At z = 1000, two distant points
were moving apart at ~60c at the
time the radiation was emitted.

Consequence of standard big bang: The physical universe is much

larger than the observable universe, and we are subject to a horizon.

Consequence of the inflationary big bang: A microscopic region of

space-time became our universe; the universe is a quantum entity.
 History

Science is Seeing
Expansion history of universe

Limit of vision of HST and JWST

Cosmic microwave background

Big bang tested and confirmed

Physics probed by accelerators

Limit of terrestrial lab physics

Tentative support from the CMB

Limit of physical understanding

 –43
Planck Era (t < 10 sec)
–43
• This era, the “first instant,” lasted for 10 sec.
• Because we are as yet unable to link:
• quantum mechanics (our theory of the very small)
• general relativity (our theory of the very large)
• We are powerless to describe what happened in this era.
–43
• 10 sec after the big bang is as far back as our current science
will allow us to go.
LHC

10-12 s
Recreating the Big Bang
 Particle Era (t < 0.001 sec; T > 1012 K)

• Particles were as numerous as photons.

–6 12
• At 10 sec after big bang, the universe cooled to 10 K.
• p+, p−, n, and n could no longer be created from two photons
• the remaining particles and antiparticles annihilated each
other into pure radiation
• slight imbalance in numbers of p and n allowed a small
residue of matter to remain
• e− and e+ are still being created from photons.
– until t = 4 sec; T > 5 x 109 K
 Nucleosynthesis Era (t < 3 min; T > 109 K)

• During this era, p+ and n started fusing…

• but new nuclei were also torn apart by the high temperatures
• When the universe was 5 minutes old…
• it had cooled to 1010 K and the fusion stopped
• Afterwards, the baryonic matter leftover in the universe was:
• 75% Hydrogen nuclei (i.e. individual protons)
• 25% Helium nuclei
• trace amounts of Deuterium (a Hygrogen isotope), Helium-3, and
Lithium nuclei
 Era of Nuclei (3 min < t < 380,000 yr)

• The universe was a hot plasma of H & He nuclei and

electrons.
• photons bounced from electron to electron, not traveling very far
• the universe was opaque (like inside a cloud)
• When the universe was 380,000 yrs old…
• it had cooled to a temperature of 3,000 K
• electrons combined with nuclei to form stable atoms of H and He
• the photons were free to stream across the universe
• the universe became transparent
 Era of Atoms (380,000 < t < 109 yr)

• The universe was filled with atomic gas.

• referred to as the “Cosmic Dark Ages”
• Density enhancements in the gas and
gravitational attraction by dark matter…
• eventually forming proto-galactic clouds
• the first star formation lights up the universe
• the first heavy elements are created
• closely followed by the formation of galaxies
 Era of Galaxies ( t > 109 yr)
• The first galaxies came into existence about 300 to
500 million years after the big bang.
• This is the current era of the universe, it is mostly
composed of large, cold vacuum.
THE UNIVERSE AND US

Us
Earth
Solar System

Milky Way

Universe Multiverse?
Multiverse
The big bang was extraordinary― the
instantaneous creation of all of space
and time, containing energy to drive
the expansion and enough matter for
100 billion galaxies.

The initial state was so compact that

it can only be described by a theory
that unites gravity and the quantum
world. We do not have such a theory
at present.

The big bang can be thought of as a

quantum event, originating from very
chaotic space-time in which the other
quantum fluctuations might have led
to other parallel universes.
Quantum fluctuations are a mechanism
for multiple realizations of the universe
…leading to the concept of the “multiverse”
More than just this…

LEVEL 1: regions we can

not see in big bang model

LEVEL 2: many bubbles of

space-time, unobservable
by us, different properties

LEVEL 3: indeterminacy,
and quantum variation

LEVEL 4: mathematical
forms, multi-dimensional
space-times, 10 preferred
 String Theory Landscape

500
String theory predicts 10 vacuum states

Expansion in these vacuum states create quantum fluctuations and provide the
initial conditions for inflation. String theory provides context for the multiverse
 10-15 m

Today, we even
believe that we Vacuum:
have an intimate quantum
knowledge of the fluctuations
constituents of nothing
Peter Skands A Quantum Journey - 85
Landscape of eternal inflation

A. Linde
 Self-reproducing Inflationary Universe

“Whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct
histories of the cosmos. Since there were many creatures and each was constantly faced with many possible courses, and
the combinations of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of
every temporal sequence.” O. Stapledon 1937, Star Maker
 How Many?
The same laws of physics everywhere,
Generic Inflation: sampling all possible initial conditions.

16
Number of distinguishable universes = 1010
BIG NUMBERS
Edge of observable universe = 1027 m
29
Nearest copy of you = 1010 m
115
Nearest copy of your universe = 1010 m

Samples all possible laws of physics, giving

Eternal Inflation: the appearance of fine-tuning.
A VERY BIG NUMBER
10,000,000
Number of distinguishable universes = 1010
The ekpyrotic universe
has a big bang, but it is
never at an infinite
temperature or infinite
density, and therefore
it is not the origin of
all of space-time.

Our universe emerged

from a collision of two
4D branes which are
embedded in a higher
dimension 5D space-
time. The collision is
the engine for cosmic
expansion and matter
creation. This is cyclic.
Eternal Universe
An Eternal Universe
History and Philosophy of Astronomy

Module 12 : The End