Our universe, the galaxies, the solar system, our home planet earth

and what you see is a vast cosmos - teaming with billions of stars and galaxies.

Turn back the clock over 13 billion years and our universe was a very different place,

back then it was small that it could fit inside the palm of your hand.

Form this infant universe everything would be created

- stars, galaxies and the building blocks of life itself.

the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood

the atoms for the air we breathe - the water we drink

the raw materials for our cities and machines

Naked Science takes a journey through space and time

and how it created everything in our world

Everything we see around us is made of matter - atoms and molecules.

Take this car - it's a 1956 Ford Fairlaine Convertible.

It's constructed from many different materials like steel, rubber and glass¡­

Go deeper and these materials are made up from combinations of elements like iron, silicon, chromium and carbon

Each and every atom that makes up this car were created by our growing universe.

Physicist Laurence Krauss studies how the atoms we see on our planet have come to be here

We really are part stardust and part big bang dust.

Most of the atoms in our body are from the cores of stars

but some of them have been around from the earliest moments of the big bang.

So we really are truly cosmic individuals

Each and every atom was created over billions of years as our universe evolved.

So when we look at this car, of course, all the atoms in this car came from stellar explosions,

from supernova processes and from stellar evolution,

but they were created at different times during the evolution of the Universe

To understand how the universe made all the raw material we see here on Earth,

and travel back through space and time to the moment our universe was born.

Suddenly a tiny speck of light appears - it was infinitely hot.

Inside this tiny fireball was all of space

This was literally the beginning of time.

The cosmic clock was ticking - time could flow and space expand.

At the earliest moments of the big bang, if you take it back to T=zero,

everything in our universe, everything we can see, all the matter and all the energy in all of the galaxies

was once contained in a region smaller than the size of a single atom today,

The idea that our universe was once tiny originated from the brilliant work of American astronomer Edwin Hubble.

Back in the 1920's most astronomers believed that everything visible in the night sky were stars

and they were part of our galaxy - the Milky Way

He studied a swirling cloud of light called the Andromeda Nebula and showed that it was a star city

another galaxy far outside of our own galaxy

He showed that these 'other' galaxies were speeding away from ours

and the further away they were, the faster they seemed to be moving

and if the universe was expanding, then at some point in the past it must have been smaller

Theoretical physicist David Spergel is a Big Bang expert

The Big Bang theory is not really a theory of how the Universe began;

it's really a theory of how the Universe evolved

No-one knows exactly what happened during the Big Bang

but scientists do know that a fraction of a second after the universe was born

this tiny super-hot fireball was already starting to expand

so we start our story when the Universe was a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a minute old

Pretty young, the Universe was the size of a marble

Less than a trillion trillionth of a second after the Big Bang

the marble sized universe was very unstable and underwent an enormous growth spurt.

During this period of incredibly rapid expansion,

Space itself was expanding faster than the speed of light.

In the same way that this hot glass ball inflates, so did the baby universe

expanding in all directions at once and as it expanded it cooled.

A trillion trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was small enough to fit inside the palm of your hand.

A tiny fraction of a second later it was the size of Mars

Another fraction of a second and the baby universe had grown to 80 times the size of the earth.

A trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and our newborn universe was still expanding

But it didn't contain matter - it was pure energy

Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 showed that mass and energy are interchangeable

It gave us the knowledge to build weapons of mass destruction.

It also revealed how the universe created the first matter.

a tiny amount of matter is annihilated and converted into energy.

In the baby universe the exact opposite happened.

It converted pure energy into particles of matter.

The universe created both matter and its arch rival anti-matter

- and when these two met they obliterated each other.

The infant universe was a war zone - a battle to the death between matter and antimatter

If they mutually annihilated each other the universe would remain full of energy with no galaxies, stars, planets or life

Fortunately for us there was an imbalance.

For every 100 million anti-particles formed, there were 100 million and 1 particles of matter

But there was that one extra particle of matter left over in each volume,

and that was enough to account for everything we see in the universe today,

This tiny imbalance led to all matter we see in the universe

- galaxies, stars, planets, - even convertibles and ourselves.

Astrophysicist Carlos Frenk from Durham University in England explains.

We are a little bit of debris left over from the annihilation of matter and antimatter;

If the Universe had not developed this slight asymmetry between matter and antimatter

the Universe would have been completely boring, there would be no structure, there would be no galaxies, there would be no planets,

Quite what this newborn Universe was like has challenged cosmologists since the Big Bang was first put forward.

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Birth of the Universe, National Geographic : Learn English!

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