The Big Bang In Pictures

Explosions in the sky: These images track the movement of particles during experiments at CERN, and could give some idea of how the Big Bang may have looked

The Big Bang In Pictures: Scientists Produce Computer Images Of Particle Explosions Similar to The Greatest Ever Galactic Light Show -- Daily Mail

It may look like a firework display in the night sky but these explosive images could be the closest we have yet come to snapshot from the birth of the universe itself.
The computer generated images are the result of the 'big bang' experiments performed by scientists at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva, Switzerland.
In trying to determine exactly how the universe came into existence, scientists have been recreating sub-atomic explosions - like the one that may have happened around the time of the big bang - using atom-sized particles of lead.

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The End Of The World As We Know It?

The universe began in a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding at an ever accelerating rate ever since. iStockPhoto

From Discovery Magazine:

Save the date: Less than 3.7 billion years from now, the world is going to end, according to a new study.

A new study suggests the universe and everything in it could end within the Earth's lifespan -- less than 3.7 billion years from now -- and we won't know it when it happens.

But one expert says the result isn't valid because the researchers chose an arbitrary end point.

The universe began in a Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding at an ever accelerating rate ever since.

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Big Bang Was Followed by Chaos, Mathematical Analysis Shows

Time line of the Universe. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 8, 2010) — Seven years ago Northwestern University physicist Adilson E. Motter conjectured that the expansion of the universe at the time of the big bang was highly chaotic. Now he and a colleague have proven it using rigorous mathematical arguments.

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‘Non-Discovery’ Of Space-Time Ripples Opens Door To Birth Of The Universe

From Times Online:

Scientists have peered further back in time than ever before using instruments designed to search for a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago but not yet proven to exist.

An American observatory hunting for ripples in space and time called gravitational waves has produced its most significant results yet, despite not having directly detected any.

The “non-discovery” offers insights into the state of the Universe just 60 seconds into its existence. Previous research has been unable to look back in time further than about 380,000 years after the big bang.

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Echoes Of The Birth Of The Universe: New Limits On Big Bang's Gravitational Waves

Aerial view of LIGO facility in Livingston, Louisiana.
(Credit: LIGO, California Institute of Technology.)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2009) — An investigation by the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration has significantly advanced our understanding the early evolution of the universe.

Analysis of data taken over a two-year period, from 2005 to 2007, has set the most stringent limits yet on the amount of gravitational waves that could have come from the Big Bang in the gravitational wave frequency band where LIGO can observe. In doing so, the gravitational-wave scientists have put new constraints on the details of how the universe looked in its earliest moments.

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What Came Before The Big Bang?

Mehau Kulyk / Science Photo Library / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Even as a boy watching the first moon landing on TV, Brian Clegg remembers wondering, "How did it all begin?" In his latest book, Before the Big Bang, the Cambridge-educated writer examines the theories that physicists and philosophers alike have put forth to explain how we got here. TIME spoke with Clegg about science as a social network, thinking outside of the box without losing his mind, and using Buffy the Vampire Slayer to explain Einstein.

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