3/28/2023 0 Comments Cosmic strings theory![]() ![]() What are Cosmic Strings? Source: Chris Ringeval/Wikimedia Commons In short, there are things happening to the fabric of spacetime right now because of the extreme temperature. ![]() ![]() If you've ever watched Alien 3 and been confused by the fate of the antagonistic Xenomorph at the end, you might not see the problem with this timeline, but superheated objects exhibit strange properties.as anyone who's ever used a ceramic plate to cover a pot of boiling rice (don't ask, it was college and I was dumb) can tell you. It takes a veritable eternity for helium and other heavier elements to start to form, but they finally do a few minutes after the Big Bang, when the temperature of the universe is about 10,000,000 degrees Kelvin.įast forward to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and radiation and matter differentiate in a universe that is about 3,000 degrees Kelvin on average. These include the proton and the neutron. In the remaining time before the first second had elapsed, the temperature of the universe drops by a factor of 1,000, to a mere 10 10 Kelvin, and quarks begin to combine into hadrons. Matter, in the form of quarks and leptons begins to emerge.įor a relatively long time afterward, not much happens, but sometime around 10 -6 seconds after the Big Bang, two types of leptons, electrons and neutrinos, are formed. Cosmic inflation now begins and the universe grows by a factor of 10 26, in about the same amount of time as it took after the Big Bang for the strong nuclear force to go its own way.īy around 10 -12 seconds after the Big Bang, the temperature cools to around 10 12 Kelvin and the last of the fundamental forces, electromagnetic and nuclear weak forces, become distinct. ![]() This infinitely tiny point would have been likewise infinitely hot, as all of that matter wasn't matter at all, but a unified superforce: the combined force of gravity, electromagnetic force, weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.Īfter a Planck unit of time (10 -43 seconds, the smallest measurable unit of time possible) from the Big Bang, the temperature of the universe plummetted to a balmy 10 29 degrees Kelvin and gravity split off from the other forces.Īt around 10 -36 seconds, as the initial temperature dropped further, a second fundamental force, the strong nuclear force, separated from the others, leaving the only the electroweak force in a unified state. The Universe Right After the Big BangĪbout 13.8 billion years ago, the universe could fit into a point smaller than even the smallest subatomic particle, smaller even than the quarks that combine to make up all matter in the universe. Though these strings have likely disappeared over time, it's the effects they may have had on the early universe that scientists hope will reveal their existence and shed light on the conditions of the universe and its evolution in the moments after the Big Bang. These cosmic strings, not to be confused with the strings of string theory, would be thinner than a proton but pack immense mass and density, enough to possibly affect the way the early universe developed through their gravitational pull. ![]()
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