Everything we see—every planet, every star, every animal, every galaxy—originated from one infinitely small area of infinitely powerful energy. When it exploded and sprang forth, it rapidly expanded, a ball of hot matter and hot gasses moving through an unknown void in all directions. It's still moving outward today about 14 billion years later.
That's the Big Bang. You've heard the story. It seemed so unreal when first proposed that it was written off as scientific quackery until enough evidence was gathered to vindicate the Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, who first proposed it in 1927. Since then, we've come to understand a lot about what happened, but never the full picture.
Matt O'Dowd of PBS Space Time put together the above video, explaining clearly just what it is that we still are struggling to understand about the dawn of everything. In particular, scientists are on the hunt for the driving engine of cosmic expansion, and the missing matter and energy (dark matter and dark energy) needed to make it work out. Everything, on paper, makes sense, but these huge missing puzzle pieces give us an incomplete picture. We only know the shape of the puzzle pieces, not what they look like.
It's a fascinating glimpse into our origins, and a great follow-on to O'Dowd's previous video, seen below:
