BIG BANG THEORY – HOW DID THE UNIVERSE BEGIN?

When we look out into the distant Universe, we're also looking back into the Universe's past. The farther
away an object is, the longer it's taken its light to travel from it to our eyes. And each time we observe
something farther away than anything we've seen before, we're looking farther back into the past -- closer
to the Big Bang -- than ever before.
The earliest thing we've ever been able to see -- of course -- is the Cosmic Microwave Background, or the
leftover glow of radiation from the Big Bang. When we observe this radiation background, which was
emitted when the Universe finally cooled to low enough temperatures that neutral atoms could form, we're
getting a snapshot of the Universe as it was from when it was only 380,000 years old!
But there is a theoretical prediction of the Big Bang that comes from even earlier times; it is perhaps the
earliest testable prediction we have about the Universe!
The Big Bang not only tells us when we should form atoms for the first time, it tells us what types of atoms
we expect there to be.
How so? Let's take you back to the earliest
times we can speak of where we still have
near-100% confidence in our physics.
Remember that the Universe is expanding
and cooling now, which means it was
hotter and denser in the distant past! Sure,
when the Universe was less than 380,000
years old, it was too hot to have neutral
atoms, but what if we go to even earlier times?
At some point it was too hot and dense to even have nuclei, and at some even earlier point than that, the
Universe was too energetic to even have individual protons and neutrons! Back when the Universe was a
tiny fraction of a second old, all we had was a sea of quarks, gluons, leptons, antileptons and ultra-hot
radiation, swirling around in the primordial soup of the Early Universe!
In this state, everything collides extremely rapidly, and is in thermal equilibrium. Creation and annihilation
of particle-antiparticle pairs happens rapidly. However, nearly all of the particles in existence here are
unstable! As the Universe expands and cools, the heavy leptons and quarks decay away, the excess matter
and antimatter find one another and annihilate, and the leftover quarks (up-and-down, in roughly equal
amounts) cool down enough to condense into individual protons and neutrons. By time the Universe is
about 10 microseconds old, protons and neutrons exist in roughly equal numbers.
However, the Universe is also filled with electrons and anti-electrons, better known as positrons. Every
time a proton collides with an energetic-enough electron it produces a neutron (and a neutrino), while every
time a neutron collides with an energetic-enough positron, it produces a proton (and an anti-neutrino).
Initially, these reactions proceed at about the same speed, giving a Universe whose normal matter is made
up of 50% protons and 50% neutrons.
But due to the fact that protons are lighter than neutrons, it becomes more energetically favorable to have
more protons than neutrons in the Universe. By time the Universe is three seconds old and the
interconversions have mostly stopped, the Universe is more like 85% protons and 15% neutrons. And at
this time, it's still hot and dense enough that the protons and neutrons attempt to undergo nuclear fusion,
into deuterium, the first heavy isotope of hydrogen!
But the Universe is filled with over a billion photons for every proton or neutron in it, and the temperature
is still far too high to produce deuterium without it being immediately destroyed. So, you wait and you wait,
until the Universe to cool down enough to make deuterium without immediately blasting it apart. In the
meantime, you're faced with the unpleasant fact that the neutron is unstable, and some of your neutrons
decay away, into protons, electrons, and an antineutrino.
Finally, when the Universe is somewhere between three and four minutes old, the photons have cooled off
enough that they can no longer blast deuterium apart faster than the protons and neutrons can meet to
form it; the Universe finally passes through the deuterium bottleneck. At this point, thanks to the decays,
the Universe is somewhere around 88% protons and only 12% neutrons.
Once you can make deuterium, the Universe wastes no time adding protons and/or neutrons to it in rapid
succession, climbing up the elemental ladder to make tritium or Helium-3, and after that, the very stable
Helium-4!
Nearly all of the neutrons wind up in Helium-4 atoms, which winds up as around 24% of the atoms, by
mass, after this nucleosynthesis. Hydrogen nuclei -- which are just single protons -- make up the other 76%.
There's also very small fraction (between 0.001% and 0.01%) in Helium-3, tritium (which decays into
Helium-3) and Deuterium, and an even smaller fraction winding up in some form of Lithium or Beryllium,
from nucleosynthesis of those rare isotopes with a Helium-4 nucleus.
But because of a combination of factors -- the lack of a stable mass-5 or mass-8 nucleus, the coolness /
relatively low density of the Universe by this time, and the strong electrical repulsion of the heavier isotopes
-- nothing heavier forms.
And so, these are the elements that are predicted by the Big Bang. With our knowledge from the Cosmic
Microwave Background, we can determine -- to incredible precision -- exactly how much Helium-4,
Helium-3, Deuterium, and Lithium-7 should be around today. This prediction -- the initial abundance of
the light elements -- is one of the greatest predictions to come out of the Big Bang model.
After that, the Universe simply expands and cools, while the unstable isotopes (like tritium) decay into
stable ones, until these atomic nuclei -- forged in the nuclear furnace of the Big Bang -- can safely capture
electrons and become neutral atoms.
Of course, seeing these first atoms, and measuring their abundances, is especially challenging. Why's that?
Let's take a look at what you can see if you look out -- and back -- into the Early Universe.
What we want to see are the very first atoms: the ones that exist back in the cosmic dark ages of the
Universe. But this presents a tremendous difficulty.
The way we detect elements in the Universe is from their atomic transitions, which either give emission
lines if the atoms are hot enough to have their electrons in an excited state drop down to a lower-energy
state, or absorption lines if the atoms are in a cold/low-energy state, but there is a hot source behind them
whose photons of a particular energy are absorbed.
The problem, of course, is that these "dark age" atoms are too cold themselves to emit those emission lines,
and the radiation coming from behind them is too low in energy to induce these absorption lines! So again,
we have to wait for gravitation to work its magic on these atoms, and to gravitationally attract enough of
them into one place so that we can get to work on making something energetic enough to induce these
atomic absorption features!
Source: https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/11/14/found-the-first-atoms-in-the-u