Because it got so big and led to such great things, some people call it the ' Big Bang.' But maybe a better name would be the ' Everywhere Stretch.Although most people know this iconic landmark as Big Ben, this is actually the name of the bell in the tower – which weighs a whopping 13.7 tonnes! There are a lot of theories about where this name came from one of them being that the bell was named after Sir Benjamin Hall, the Chief Commissioner of Works, who was affectionately known as ‘Big Ben’. That’s pretty much how the universe began. How long did all of this take? Well, we now know that the universe is 13,800,000,000 years old-that’s 13.8 billion. As new stars were being born and dying, then things like asteroids, comets, planets, and black holes formed! At the same time, galaxies were crashing and grouping together. The first stars created bigger atoms and groups of atoms. Over lots of time, atoms came together to form stars and galaxies. As everything expanded and took up more space, it cooled down. When the universe began, it was just hot, tiny particles mixed with light and energy. If things were moving apart, it meant that long ago, everything had been close together.Įverything we can see in our universe today-stars, planets, comets, asteroids-they weren't there at the beginning. This meant that the universe was still expanding, just like Lemaître thought. The farthest galaxies were moving faster than the ones close to us. Just two years later, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble noticed that other galaxies were moving away from us.

Thinking about how it all started is hard to imagine.

The universe is a very big place, and it’s been around for a very long time. He said the universe stretched and expanded to get as big as it is now, and that it could keep on stretching. He said that a very long time ago, the universe started as just a single point.

In 1927, an astronomer named Georges Lemaître had a big idea. It is the idea that the universe began as just a single point, then expanded and stretched to grow as large as it is right now-and it is still stretching! The big bang is how astronomers explain the way the universe began.

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