STARS TURN ON

OK. I am not an astronomer. I'm interested. I can identify some constellations when a hill or a lot of tall trees are in the way. So I'll do the best I can on a part of creation that is had to wrap your brain around.

Scientists call it the "Big Bang." Although if there was a real "bang" there was no one to hear it. The elusive evidence of the beginning of all there would ever be hasn't been discovered. Knowledge gained from our modern telescopes put the age of the universe at approximately 13.8 billion years.

"In the beginning all space, energy, and matter came into existence from and unknowable void. Nothing. Then something. The concept is beyond our ability to craft metaphors. Our universe did not suddenly appear where there had only been vacuum before, for before the Big Bang there was no volume and no time. Our concept of nothingness implies emptiness. Before the Big Bang there was nothing to be empty in.

Then in an instant, there was not just something, but everything that would  ever be, all at once." Robert Hazen, The Story of Earth pp. 7-8.

It may have taken half a million years for the baby universe to cool down to several thousand degrees. Cool enough for the first protons and neutrons or just protons already formed to be joined by electrons, giving birth to the first atoms. Mostly hydrogen, some helium and a little lithium.

Image courtesy of the Gemini Project

A hydrogen molecule is the simplest atom, number one on the periodic table of elements. One proton and one electron. You wouldn't think that gravity would have an effect but it does. When enough hydrogen atoms get together they start twirling and swirling and getting closer and closer together until enough atoms get close enough that fusion begins and and the star "turns" on. To bad nobody was around to see it happen. Of course the whole process can take hundreds of thousands of years. And we're like mayflies compared to the age of the universe.