“Reheating was an insane time, when everything went haywire,” says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. As the Big Bang theory goes, reports MIT, somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago the universe exploded into being, as an infinitely small, compact fireball of matter that cooled as it expanded, triggering reactions that cooked up the first stars and galaxies, and all the forms of matter that we see (and are) today.
There were four main phases of the Big Bang era: (1) the beginning of the universe as a singularity in space and time, (2) a period of cosmic inflation where the universe grew and cooled exponentially, (3) an episode of reheating, lasting only a trillionth of a second, where the potential energy from inflation decayed into all of the elementary particles of physics, and finally (4) the normal expansion of the Universe where quarks combined into protons and neutrons and the four fundamental forces of physics separated into their distinctive forms.
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