What is the origin of the universe? (with many events that have helped in our understanding of the event)
By Frutiv
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Many Aboriginal peoples from around Australia including the people of the Kulin nations believe that spirits (ancestors) created the world (universe), including the rivers, land, rocks, plants, hills and animals. At the beginning of the Dreamtime the ancestors made everything and there are many different ancestors. One quite well known in the Kulin nations called Bunjil, the wedged tail eagle. Bunjil is known for creating the land we all live on and watching over it along with other spirits.
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Sometime during this period the religion known today in english as Hinduism, began and the story of the cosmic egg likely began to be used around this time as well. The cosmic egg is said to be an egg as big as the cosmos created by God in which God himself meditated in. 1000 years after the creation of the egg it burst, this lead to God himself coming out of the egg and becoming the Progenitor of the universe.
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According to the greeks everything started from Chaos which was described as a "yawning nothingness". Then Gaia, who was the earth came out from the void along with other divine brings such as eros (love), Abyss (part of the underworld) and Erebus (the unknowable place where death dwells). Then "Without male assistance, Gaia gave birth to Uranus (the Sky), who then fertilised her" (Khan Academy). Many other Gods and divine beings followed soon after including Poseidon who is the god of the sea.
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The Quran has 2 main verses that mention the beginning and expansion of the universe through the beliefs of islam, one is "Allah created the heavens and the earth, and all that is between them, in six days" (7:54), and in another one of the verses it is also mentions that the universe will expand up until a point and then will collapse.
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Henrietta Leavitt worked at the Harvard college observatory and during her life working there she discovered the Period Luminosity scale, which was a way to measure up to 10 million light years away from the place of observation based on the luminosity of cepheid variable stars (stars that frequently changed in luminosity). Leavitt's Period Luminosity scale was what allowed both Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître to observe many galaxies far, far away and begin research on the big bang Theory.
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Vesto Slipher measured radial velocities of 25 spiral nebulae and using this information discovered that the universe is in a constant state of expansion. Slipher used a technique that many astronomers still use today, he took light emitted from other galaxies and split it onto a colour spectrum. This information was then used to tell the different elements that were being observed as well as used to observe the movement of the galaxies as with movement the light was shifted to a more red tone.
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Hubbles many discoveries also led to his observation the the red light shift of galaxies was directly connected to their distance away from where they were being seen from.
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Edwin Hubble may not be well known by the general public, however Hubble had a telescope named after him due to his many astronomic discoveries. One of which included the 900,000 light year distance between our solar system and the closest galaxy other than our own, the Andromeda Galaxy. Hubble further measured 23 other galaxies which were up to 20 million light years away for earth, these discoveries were both part of the building blocks for the big bang theory.
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Georges Lemaître starts theorising about the start of the universe, using evidence from Hubbles and his own discoveries. Hubble used an extremely powerful telescope at the time to see in past at galaxies, through this technique the first scientific theory that had mountains of evidence behind it about the start of the universe began to take shape. Lemaître used much of Edwin Hubbles discoveries as evidence for the new theory.
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Georges Lemaître is back and decided to write a paper about the big bang theory. Lemaître's theory suggests that the universe began from just a single primordial atom and further research by both Lemaître and other astronomers and scientists found that not only is this theory true but that "In the first 10^-43 seconds of its existence, the universe was very compact, less than a million billion billionth the size of a single atom." (National Geographic, 2017).
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After the big bang theory was created many still did not believe it, the Steady State theory was a theory countering what the big bang theory said about the beginning of the universe. Fred Hoyle, created this theory which stated that "matter is continuously created as the Universe expands," which keeps density at an average over time. Whereas the big bang theory stated that density drops as galaxies move away from one another and eventually there will be no way of reaching other galaxies. -
Cosmic Microwave Background is known as the "nail in the coffin" for the steady state theory, as this background basically tells us what the universes matter was like when the universe was just a baby. This directly lead to the discovery of density fluctuations throughout the observable universe, which was the opposite to what the steady state theory stated. This leads to the common acceptance of the big bang theory we see today.