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Skarr87 t1_j8iuyal wrote

The inflation of the early universe is what put the material that will eventually become the stars far apart from each other. Imagine if you have an empty balloon and you put little dots on it close together. Then you inflate it, those dots will now be much further apart. Now anything that happens to those dots has to travel the distance in between.

I think the problem you may have is incomplete understanding of the time scale. Right after the Big Bang up to about 10^-36 seconds all the fundamental forces were one, after that they began to separate from each other. We think this is what caused cosmic inflation. From that time to about 10^-32 seconds cosmic inflation occurred. Nuclei would have began forming a bit later around 10^-6 seconds to 1 second after the Big Bang. By then everything was already spread out. Starts won’t form for somewhere between 100k to 100 million years later.

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fuerdiesache t1_j92psso wrote

for your 2nd para, how do we know all this is correct? isnt cmb the only information we have from early universe and it comes after 100k years of big bang? (if so, all this 10^-36, 10^-6 secs after the big bang sounds like a bunch of hokum, when there is zero evidence to verify it)

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Skarr87 t1_j93wpsi wrote

Correct we don’t have direct evidence from that early right after the Big Bang but we can use mathematical models we’ve developed from centuries from scientific experimentation. We then work these models back to conditions that we would expect that early in the universe. These models then make specific predictions that we can perform other experiments to see how accurate our models are. For example the standard model predicted that in conditions with very high temperatures the fundamental forces become one and at slightly lower temperatures something called quark gluon plasma would form where protons and neutrons themselves break down into almost a soup. When we were able to engineer particle accelerators to have enough energy we were able to actually produce quark gluon plasma and partially prove that at least the weak force and electromagnetic force combine into the electroweak force.

It’s all kind of like a big jigsaw puzzle. Every time we make a new discovery it’s like we add another piece telling us more and more about the nature of the whole picture. If you have 60% of the puzzle finished and you see a corn field it’s reasonable to assume the rest isn’t going to be something like an underwater scene.

We don’t know everything about what happened immediately after the Big Bang, but assuming the laws of physics weren’t simply different then it’s not going to be drastically different than what we think barring some new paradigm shifting discovery.

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