'Big Bang' Most probably, you all are aware of this term. About 13.8 billion years ago, everything was engulfed in a sphere smaller than an atom with infinite mass and temperature. Before this, nothing was in existence, not even time.
Eventually, the universe smaller than the size of an atom came into existence. Within the millionth part of a second, this universe came into its existence, and that's what we call 'The Big Bang.
So now you can imagine how necessary was Big Bang for the existence of that universe that is known to us now, but can you imagine if I say the great 'Big Bang Theory' was accidentally discovered.
To prove the Big Bang, scientists were looking for evidence, and for the proof of the Big Bang, they needed a different type of telescope so that they could see other electromagnetic waves lying in the visible light. Visible light is a small part of the electromagnetic wave. We can see with our own eyes, but as the wavelength increases, the electromagnetic waves move from gamma rays to microwave and radio waves.
1964 Astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson worked on a new radio telescope with an antenna capable of observing microwaves and radio waves coming from space.
They thought through this they would see the faint glow emitted by the Milky Way when they moved this radio telescope towards space where nothing should have existed, but they found something strange there. There was nothing in the area, but microwave signals were coming from there, indicating that something was hot there.
Then these signals were being observed from every direction; they were coming from all around space; both of those astronomers felt that it would be a technical fault, so they made every effort to examine the telescope thoroughly, but these signals were still being received.
They were told that the temperature should be Absolute Zero, but the temperature was 3 degrees above Absolute Zero. They did not know what it was, but they had unknowingly discovered the evidence of the Big Bang.
These microwaves were the afterglow of the Big Bang, which can be seen all around even today; if we extinguish the sky's stars and make it completely dark, we will see the light red glow; this glow emanated during the Big Bang. This light is present everywhere in the universe today but in the form of microwaves.
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978 for their historic discovery. After this, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which was launched in 2001, was a smaller and more modern form of Penzias and Wilson's big radio telescope.
Through this, a detailed map of that afterglow was made, and we got a detailed map of the cosmic microwave background; it took 9 years of hard work to make it, and that is a picture of our universe at the time when our universe was born. So that's how the 'Big Bang Theory was created, and we found evidence of it.
But some of you must have this question in your mind that how did we find out that the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago from today? The answer is straightforward.
If you are watching the explosion in a video, you can rewind that video to see when the explosion started. In the same way, by measuring the speed of the expansion of the universe, through some calculations, scientists estimated that 13.8 billion years ago, all these galaxies would be compressed into one point.
So we got an approximate time in this way, so now you know how the Big Bang was discovered; most people believe this theory because the evidence we got fits according to this theory.
From then, the Big Bang theory time to time, encountered many questions; the biggest question associated with this theory is what was before the Big Bang, and if there was nothing before it, how did the Big Bang occur. Scientists do not have the answer yet, but it does not mean that we relate Big Bang to some spiritual energy; it simply means that we are not so developed yet to find the answer.
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