I’ve hear before that the big bang wasn’t really an explosion, more of the point in time where the universe started rapidly expanding. Can someone explain where the all the matter that makes up planets, stars, etc. came from?
In: Physics
We know how it happened, we just don’t know why. In the very first moments of the big bang, a phenomenon known as baryonic asymmetry occurred. According to the conservation of energy, there should have been an equal number of left handed baryons and right handed anti-baryons created. These would have collided with and annihilated each other. But that isn’t what happened. Every so often, an extra left handed baryon was created (left handed is referring to the spin of the particle). After all the matter/antimatter pairs were annihilated in those first moments, these extra baryons were what was left over. They eventually coalesced into matter. And that is how we have a matter filled universe, and not an antimatter filled universe, or what we would have expected; no universe at all.
Now, as to how the big bang happened in the first place, or why baryonic asymmetry occurred, those are still mysteries to physicists. One hypothesis is that the universe is a simulation, which implies that it was initiated by some form of intelligence. I personally like that theory the best, because I suspect that the creation of a universe is something that intelligent beings such as ourselves could one day achieve.
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