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Credit: NAOJ The universe is a big place, and by peering across it astronomers get to look back in time . A galaxy or supernova so far away that it takes two billion years for its light to reach us will be seen here as it appeared two billion years ago. Remarkably, today s best telescopes can look across the majority of cosmic time, spying on galaxies as they looked just hundreds of millions of years after the big bang.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Inflation, the brief period that occurred less than a second after the Big Bang, is nearly as difficult to fathom as the Big Bang itself. Physicists calculate that inflation lasted for just a tiny fraction of a second, yet during this time the Universe grew in size by a factor of 1078. Also during this time, a very important thing occurred: fluctuations in the quantum vacuum appeared, which later resulted in the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that in turn produced large-scale structures such as galaxies.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Inflation, the brief period that occurred less than a second after the Big Bang, is nearly as difficult to fathom as the Big Bang itself. Physicists calculate that inflation lasted for just a tiny fraction of a second, yet during this time the Universe grew in size by a factor of 1078. Also during this time, a very important thing occurred: fluctuations in the quantum vacuum appeared, which later resulted in the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that in turn produced large-scale structures such as galaxies

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Standard Model of Physics suggests that shortly after the Big Bang there should have been the same amount of antimatter in existence as there was matter. As time passed, both should have decayed roughly equally, leaving roughly the same amounts of each today.

By peering into the distance with the biggest and best telescopes in the world, astronomers have managed to glimpse exploding stars, galaxies and other glowing cosmic beacons as they appeared just hundreds of millions of years after the big bang.

Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU, Germany) have built what is currently the strongest source of ultracold neutrons. Ultracold neutrons (UCNs) were first generated here five years ago.

Thirty years ago Alan H. Guth, then a struggling physics postdoc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, gave a series of seminars in which he introduced “inflation” into the lexicon of cosmology

General relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, gives us a useful basis for mathematically modeling the large scale universe – while quantum theory gives us a useful basis for modeling sub-atomic particle physics and the likely small-scale, high-energy-density physics of the early universe – nanoseconds after the Big Bang – which general relativity just models as a singularity and has nothing else to say on the matter.