29.3 The beginning of the universe  (Page 2/7)

George gamow and collaborators.

Gamow’s ideas were close to our modern view, except we now know that the early universe remained hot enough for fusion for only a short while. Thus, only the three lightest elements—hydrogen, helium, and a small amount of lithium—were formed in appreciable abundances at the beginning. The heavier elements formed later in stars. Since the 1940s, many astronomers and physicists have worked on a detailed theory of what happened in the early stages of the universe.

The first few minutes

Let’s start with the first few minutes following the Big Bang. Three basic ideas hold the key to tracing the changes that occurred during the time just after the universe began. The first, as we have already mentioned, is that the universe cools as it expands. [link] shows how the temperature changes with the passage of time. Note that a huge span of time, from a tiny fraction of a second to billions of years, is summarized in this diagram. In the first fraction of a second, the universe was unimaginably hot. By the time 0.01 second had elapsed, the temperature had dropped to 100 billion (10 ¹¹ ) K. After about 3 minutes, it had fallen to about 1 billion (10 ⁹ ) K, still some 70 times hotter than the interior of the Sun. After a few hundred thousand years, the temperature was down to a mere 3000 K, and the universe has continued to cool since that time.

Temperature of the universe.

All of these temperatures but the last are derived from theoretical calculations since (obviously) no one was there to measure them directly. As we shall see in the next section, however, we have actually detected the feeble glow of radiation emitted at a time when the universe was a few hundred thousand years old. We can measure the characteristics of that radiation to learn what things were like long ago. Indeed, the fact that we have found this ancient glow is one of the strongest arguments in favor of the Big Bang model.

The second step in understanding the evolution of the universe is to realize that at very early times, it was so hot that it contained mostly radiation (and not the matter that we see today). The photons that filled the universe could collide and produce material particles; that is, under the conditions just after the Big Bang, energy could turn into matter (and matter could turn into energy). We can calculate how much mass is produced from a given amount of energy by using Einstein’s formula E = mc ² (see the chapter on The Sun: A Nuclear Powerhouse ).