If they could predict the starting conditions of their virtual universes, they hoped to be able to accurately predict what our own universe may have looked like back at the beginning. With what is known about the universe today, the researchers on this 2021 study compared their understanding of how gravitational forces interacted in the primordial universe with their thousands of computer-modeled universes. "We are trying to do something like guessing a baby photo of our universe from the latest picture," study leader Masato Shirasaki, a cosmologist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), wrote in an email to Live Science. In one case, cosmologists are pressing rewind (opens in new tab) to reach the first instant after the Big Bang by simulating 4,000 versions of the current universe on a massive supercomputer.
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Reconstructing the universe's infancyīecause we can't see it directly, scientists have been trying to figure out how to "see" the Big Bang through other measures. The two groups each published papers in the Astrophysical Journal in 1965. Simultaneously, a Princeton University team led by Robert Dicke was trying to find evidence of the CMB and realized that Penzias and Wilson had stumbled upon it with their strange observations. At first, they thought the anomaly was due to pigeons trying to roost inside the antenna and their waste, but they cleaned up the mess and killed the pigeons (opens in new tab) and the anomaly persisted. This accidental discovery happened when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, both of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, were building a radio receiver in 1965 and picked up higher-than-expected temperatures, according to NASA (opens in new tab). Related: Images: Peering back to the Big Bang & early universe It was first predicted by Ralph Alpher and other scientists in 1948 but was found only by accident almost 20 years later. Sometimes called the "afterglow" of the Big Bang, this light is more properly known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This allowed light to finally shine through, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
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Over time, however, these free electrons met up with nuclei and created neutral atoms, or atoms with equal positive and negative electric charges.
"The free electrons would have caused light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in clouds," NASA stated. This early "soup" would have been impossible to actually see because it couldn't hold visible light. The cosmos now contained a vast array of fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons and protons - the raw materials that would become the building blocks for everything that exists today. This all happened within just the first second after the universe began, when the temperature of everything was still insanely hot, at about 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 billion Celsius), according to NASA (opens in new tab). Hubble images show the far-distant galaxy GN-z11 as it was soon after the Big Bang (Image credit: NASA)
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