User:Gabewill99/sandbox

Bang! Debris shoots into space at astronomical speeds. Believe it or not, this is what scientists say may have been the big thing to watch approximately ten to fifteen billion years ago. We call it the Big Bang. This is the idea that everything started as a single point in space, also known as a singularity. Then it just all of the sudden blew up, throwing debris in all directions at crazy speeds, and at which they are still moving today. Don’t believe me? One of the many pieces of evidence for the Big Bang is redshift. Redshift has to do with the color being emitted from far away stars. It is much like the Doppler Effect; as the planet moves farther away from us, the light waves it emits get longer from peak to peak. As a result of the waves getting longer, the light of the star becomes ever so slightly red. The reverse of redshift (an example would be the Andromeda galaxy) is when a star is moving towards us and the wavelengths shorten, causing a slight blue color. The idea of the Big Bang suggests that the universe is expanding at enormous speeds and everything is moving away from everything else. This is where redshift comes in. It proves that everything except the aforementioned Andromeda galaxy is moving away from us, and at enormous speeds. Still not convinced? Well, another piece of evidence is background radiation. Such a large explosion coming from such a small, dense object would cause astronomical amounts of energy. These high amounts of energy transfer into radiation. Think Chernobyl times 1023, and then some. Now, with an explosion that big, there has to be some radiation left over, even if it is 10,000,000,000 years later. Well, there is. Even today, there are amazing amounts of radiation in space, known as background radiation. Background radiation we know doesn’t come

from the stars because it is constant throughout the universe. Radiation from stars slowly dies the further you get away from said star. Even better, scientists say that the amount of background radiation is exactly the amount they would expect to see at this time. Now, if you are like me, it is going to take a little more than that to convince you that the Big Bang may have happened. So, here’s some more evidence. Our next piece of evidence is the stars themselves. With a giant explosion creating the whole universe, all of the stars should be about the same age, and they are. There is a bit of a variation in the ages of the stars (a bit being in space terms, or about 1,000,000 years) but this can easily be explained. You see, stars have to have the right elements and the right mass to form. Without one of these, the star could not cause nuclear fission and there would be no star, just a cloud of gas and rock. This can take time, and that time depends on what elements are available in the area, hence the difference in the age.