Scientists Confirm A Simple Model Of The Universe's First 380,000 Years
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Creationists today face a distinct challenge compared to their predecessors from one or two centuries ago. They must continually devise ways to ignore or dismiss the relentless flow of scientific evidence disproving their beliefs, while simultaneously rationalizing the complete lack of evidence supporting claims of a young Earth, special creation through supernatural means, or the existence of a creator capable of producing a universe from nothing.
Individuals with a normal degree of intellectual honesty, when confronted with overwhelming evidence against their beliefs and a lack of supportive evidence, would naturally see this as grounds for doubt and reassessment. Creationists, however, appear undeterred, convinced that their personal beliefs override scientific evidence without the necessity for evidential justification.
Compounding their difficulties, scientists recently announced a significant advancement: they have mapped the cosmic microwave background radiation—the residual echo of the Big Bang—in unprecedented detail. Utilizing data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, this new research reveals conditions in the universe as they existed only 380,000 years after the Big Bang, roughly 13.8 billion years ago.
On the scale of a human lifetime, this is the equivalent of a photograph of a now middle-aged person, taken one hour after they were born, and, in a confirmation of the principle of Occam's Razor, the simplest model is conformed as the correct model.
Describe for me the current consensus on the first 380,000 years of the universe, please.The international team of cosmologists, including scientists from Cardiff University, Wales, are to present their findings to the American Physical Society annual meeting on Wednesday 19 March 2025. They will then submit a paper for peer review for publication in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. According to a Cardiff University press release:The current scientific consensus on the first 380,000 years of the universe—known as the early universe—can be summarized as follows:
Importance of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)
- The Big Bang (~13.8 billion years ago)
- The universe began approximately 13.8 billion years ago as an immensely dense and hot singularity.
- Space and time emerged during this event, rapidly expanding outward—a process known as cosmic inflation.
- Inflationary Epoch (10⁻³⁶ to 10⁻³² seconds after the Big Bang)
- In the earliest fractions of a second, the universe underwent a brief but dramatic exponential expansion known as cosmic inflation.
- Inflation solved several problems in cosmology, such as the universe’s large-scale uniformity (the "horizon problem") and flat geometry (the "flatness problem").
- Formation of Fundamental Forces and Particles
- Shortly after inflation, the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force) separated from a unified state.
- Elementary particles—quarks, leptons, photons—emerged as the universe cooled from unimaginable energies.
- Quark-Gluon Plasma and Hadron Epoch (up to 1 second after the Big Bang)
- Initially, the universe was filled with a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons known as quark-gluon plasma.
- As temperatures cooled, quarks bound together into protons and neutrons (collectively known as hadrons).
- Nucleosynthesis Era (about 1 second to 20 minutes after the Big Bang)
- In this critical period, known as Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, the universe cooled sufficiently for protons and neutrons to fuse, forming nuclei of lighter elements.
- Hydrogen, helium, deuterium, lithium, and trace amounts of other light nuclei were produced, resulting in roughly 75% hydrogen and 25% helium by mass—still observed in the universe today.
- Photon Era (20 minutes to ~380,000 years after the Big Bang)
- The universe continued expanding and cooling, but remained opaque due to photons interacting continuously with charged particles (mainly free electrons).
- This dense photon-electron-proton plasma prevented photons (light) from traveling freely.
- Recombination (about 380,000 years after the Big Bang)
- Approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe had cooled enough (~3,000 K) for electrons to combine with protons, forming neutral hydrogen atoms—a process called recombination.
- This event allowed photons to move freely for the first time, producing the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB)—the universe’s oldest observable light.
The consensus described above is part of the widely accepted cosmological model known as ΛCDM (Lambda Cold Dark Matter), which remains the cornerstone of modern cosmology.
- The CMB provides a detailed snapshot of the universe at the recombination era, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
- Tiny fluctuations in the CMB represent the seeds of all future structure formation (galaxies, stars, planets).
- Observations from instruments such as COBE, WMAP, Planck, and recently the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), have significantly enhanced our understanding of the universe’s infancy and supported the standard cosmological model.
Telescope observations reveal universe’s hours-old baby pictures, scientists sayThe next major hurdle for cosmology is to get through the opaque barrier at this current 380,000 year age of the universe when light could not escape the electromagnetic effect of the charged particles that space was full of until the universe had cooled enough for electron to be captured by protons to form electrically neutral hydrogen atoms which allowed light to move freely and make the universe transparent. This barrier means we can't look back in time far enough to see the universe as it was before atoms formed.
The clearest and most precise images yet of the universe in its infancy – the earliest cosmic time accessible to humans – have been produced by an international team of astronomers.
Measuring light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), that travelled for more than 13 billion years to reach a telescope high in the Chilean Andes, the new images reveal the universe when it was about 380,000 years old – the equivalent of hours-old baby pictures of a now middle-aged cosmos.
The research, by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, shows both the intensity and polarization of the earliest light after the Big Bang with unprecedented clarity, revealing the formation of ancient, consolidating clouds of hydrogen and helium that later developed into the first stars and galaxies.
The team, which includes researchers from Cardiff University, says analysing the CMB in high definition has enabled them to confirm a simple model of the universe, ruling out many competing alternatives.
They will present their results at the American Physical Society annual meeting on Wednesday 19 March 2025, before submitting to the peer review process for publication in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Professor Erminia Calabrese, Director of Research at Cardiff University’s School of Physics and Astronomy and a lead author of one of the studies being presented, said:A major goal of the work was to investigate alternative models for the universe that would explain the disagreement emerged in recent years about the Hubble constant, the rate at which space is expanding today.These new images allow us to reconstruct with high precision the processes that seeded the complex cosmic structures that we see in the night sky and our own planet too.
We’ve been able to measure more precisely than ever before that the observable universe extends almost 50 billion light years in all directions from us, and contains as much mass as 1,900 ‘zetta-Suns’, or almost 2 trillion trillion Suns. Of those 1,900 zetta-Suns, the mass of normal matter – the kind we can see and measure – makes up only 100. Three quarters of this is hydrogen and a quarter is helium. The elements that humans are made of – mostly carbon, with oxygen, nitrogen, iron and even traces of gold – were formed later in stars and are just a sprinkling on top of this cosmic stew.
Another 500 zetta-Suns of mass is in the invisible dark matter of an as-yet unknown nature, and the remaining 1,300 are the dominating vacuum energy or “dark energy” of empty space.
Professor Erminia Calabrese, lead author of one of the papers being presented.
Deputy Director of Research
Astronomy Instrumentation Group
Astronomy Group
Cardiff Hub for Astrophysics Research and Technology.
Measurements derived from the CMB have consistently shown an expansion rate of 67–68 kilometres per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc), while measurements derived from the movement of nearby galaxies indicate a Hubble constant as high as 73–74 km/s/Mpc.
Using their newly released data, the ACT team confirmed the lower value for the Hubble constant, and with increased precision.
The new measurements have also refined the estimate of the age of the universe, finding it to be 13.8 billion years old, with an uncertainty of only 0.1%.We scanned many classes of models which could give a higher value of the expansion rate but they were not favoured by the new data.
Professor Erminia Calabrese.
ACT has been major research focus for the Cardiff University team with its Astronomy Instrumentation Group involved in the optical layout of ACT since the first instrument design back in 2004.
Our unique filters have enabled the ACT detectors to operate at the sensitivity required to make these tremendous measurements.
Professor Carole Tucker
Astronomy Instrumentation Group
Cardiff Hub for Astrophysics Research and Technology
Work led by Professor Calabrese since 2011 has turned the data into information about fundamental properties of the cosmos.
The final data characterisation and interpretation presented at the meeting marks the end of four years’ work together with Cardiff post-doctoral researcher Hidde Jense.ACT has been my cosmic laboratory during my PhD study, it has been thrilling to be part of the endeavour leading to this refined understanding of our universe.
Hidde Jense.
ACT completed its observations in 2022, and attention is now turning to the new, more capable, Simons Observatory at the same location in Chile – the next major CMB project for the Cardiff team.
The project is led by Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, with 160 collaborators at 65 institutions. ACT operated in Chile from 2007-2022 under an agreement with the University of Chile, in the Atacama Astronomical Park.It is great to see ACT retiring with this display of results. The circle continues to close around our standard model of cosmology, with these latest results weighing in strongly on what universes are no longer possible.
Professor Erminia Calabrese.
But, according to this report from Cornell University arXiv, Professor Calabrese’s group are beginning to chip away at that barrier':
We use new cosmic microwave background (CMB) primary temperature and polarization anisotropy measurements from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) Data Release 6 (DR6) to test foundational assumptions of the standard cosmological model and set constraints on extensions to it. We derive constraints from the ACT DR6 power spectra alone, as well as in combination with legacy data from Planck. To break geometric degeneracies, we include ACT and Planck CMB lensing data and baryon acoustic oscillation data from DESI Year-1, and further add supernovae measurements from Pantheon+ for models that affect the late-time expansion history. We verify the near-scale-invariance (running of the spectral indexOf course, the scientists involved in this research, being professional cosmologists, did not set out specifically to refute creationism. Childish, magical notions of a universe conjured into existence from nothing by an immaterial, magical being are so evidently absurd that no serious scientist considers them worthy of serious attention or resources.) and adiabaticity of the primordial perturbations. Neutrino properties are consistent with Standard Model predictions: we find no evidence for new light, relativistic species that are free-streaming ( , which combined with external BBN data becomes ), for non-zero neutrino masses ), or for neutrino self-interactions. We also find no evidence for self-interacting dark radiation ( ), early-universe variation of fundamental constants, early dark energy, primordial magnetic fields, or modified recombination. Our data are consistent with standard BBN, the FIRAS-inferred CMB temperature, a dark matter component that is collisionless and with only a small fraction allowed as axion-like particles, a cosmological constant, and the late-time growth rate predicted by general relativity. We find no statistically significant preference for a departure from the baseline ΛCDM model. In general, models introduced to increase the Hubble constant or to decrease the amplitude of density fluctuations inferred from the primary CMB are not favored by our data.
Erminia Calabrese, J. Colin Hill, Hidde T. Jense, et. al
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Constraints on Extended Cosmological Models
arXiv astro-ph.CO; (2025) 2503.14454 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14454
Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published Open access. Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
Even the attempts by some Old Earth creationists to reinterpret Bronze Age biblical origin myths as allegorical or metaphorical descriptions of Big Bang cosmology fail scrutiny. The biblical narrative incorrectly places the creation of light before its source (the sun), and green plants before the sun they rely on for photosynthesis. Such fundamental inaccuracies demonstrate clearly that the biblical creation account is neither allegory nor metaphor; it is simply incorrect.
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