How old was the universe before the Big Bang?
Sophia Aguilar
Published May 31, 2026
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Thereof, what was before the Big Bang?
It's possible that before the Big Bang, the universe was an infinite stretch of an ultrahot, dense material, persisting in a steady state until, for some reason, the Big Bang occured. This extra-dense universe may have been governed by quantum mechanics, the physics of the extremely small scale, Carroll said.
Likewise, how do we know the Big Bang actually occurred? The earliest and most direct observational evidence of the validity of the theory are the expansion of the universe according to Hubble's law (as indicated by the redshifts of galaxies), discovery and measurement of the cosmic microwave background and the relative abundances of light elements produced by BBN.
how old is the universe?
13.772 billion years
How do we know when the universe began?
Fundamental mysteries. According to the standard Big Bang model, the universe was born during a period of inflation that began about 13.8 billion years ago. Like a rapidly expanding balloon, it swelled from a size smaller than an electron to nearly its current size within a tiny fraction of a second.
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