Quote:
Originally Posted by Praxeas
Are you talking about the BB? One thing I don't understand is how, out of that singularity, did we get all these planets and stars and all the various elements and compounds......
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Remember Einstein's famous equation?
E = mc2
Matter (or mass) is energy. (E=M). They're the same thing, just in different states like water and steam. I'm being simplistic here, but that's the gist of it. The galaxies and everything else weren't "in the singularity." There was nothing there but the energy. And then, for reasons unknown, the singularity began to expand at a rather rapid pace before going through a very brief period of enormous expansion (lasting 10 to the negative 33 power of a second) and then continuing along in its expansion that we observe today.
As the expansion progressed things cooled down, just the way an expanding gas will cool your refrigerator. The cooling in the early universe allowed the energy to coalesce and subatomic particles formed. This is unlikely to happen in your refrigerator, however. The subatomic particles (baryons, leptons and stuff) then formed hydrogen and a very small amount of helium (I'm skipping some things for brevity).
The hydrogen then formed along "creases" in the fabric of space and began to clump together to form stars and quasars. The quasars (in a process that we don't have pinned down yet) appeared to draw in more hydrogen to produce the first proto-galaxies. In other cases galaxies appear to have formed in the absence of quasars, or something happened to the quasar. The stars would then fuse the hydrogen into heavier elements and "slough" off the produce (along with unfused hydrogen) into the surrounding space. When they got to the heaviest elements like iron and upward - only the blast of a supernova was needed to create things like uranium.
We observe all these processes going on around us today. The dust from which Adam was formed (and you and me!) was formed from elements synthesized in the stars.
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