The Big Bang Theory is the most widely accepted theory about the origins of the universe. To put it another way, the universe began with an impossibly hot and dense single point that expanded and stretched over the following 13.8 billion years — initially at unthinkable rates, then at a more measured rate — to become the still-expanding cosmos we see today.

Everything in the universe was compressed into an infinitesimally tiny singularity, a point of infinite density and heat, around 13.7 billion years ago. Our universe began to grow at a quicker rate than light, extending outwards faster than light.

According to one of the renowned scientists Alan Guth's 1980 theory, which transformed the way we think about the Big Bang forever, this was a phase of cosmic inflation that lasted only fractions of a second — around 10^32 of a second.

When cosmic inflation came to a sudden and still-mysterious stop, the more traditional Big Bang interpretations grabbed root. The "reheating" of matter and radiation began to populate our universe with the matter and radiation we know today: particles, atoms, and the matter that would form stars and galaxies, and so on.

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This all happened in the first second after the universe began when the temperature about everything was still incredibly high, roughly 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA (5.5 billion degrees Celsius). The universe now included a wide variety of fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons, and protons — the raw materials that would later become the building blocks for everything we know today.

When cosmic inflation came to a sudden and still-mysterious stop, the more traditional Big Bang interpretations grabbed root. The "reheating" of matter and radiation began to populate our universe with the matter and radiation we know today: particles, atoms, the matter that would form stars and galaxies, and so on.

This all happened in the first second after the universe began, when the temperature of everything was still incredibly high, roughly 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA (5.5 billion degrees Celsius).The universe now included a wide variety of fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons, and protons — the raw materials that would later become the building blocks for everything we know today. Because it could not hold visible light, this early "soup" would have been difficult to perceive. However, over time, these unbound electrons collided with nuclei, forming neutral atoms, which have equal positive and negative electric charges.

About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, this allowed light to eventually shine through. This light is sometimes referred to as the "Big Bang's afterglow." The Lambda-CDM Big Bang model is currently the sole theory that makes testable predictions and is backed up by evidence.

Dark Energy arose in the 1990s as a means of resolving unresolved cosmological difficulties. It also explained why the cosmos is still accelerating? This resolved Einstein's Cosmological Constant, in addition to providing an explanation for the universe's missing mass (together with Dark Matter, which was first postulated in 1932 by Jan Oort).

Thanks to advancements in telescopes, satellites, and computer simulations, astronomers and cosmologists have been able to observe more of the universe and obtain a better grasp of its true age.

The development of space telescopes such as the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), Hubble Space Telescope, Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), and Planck Observatory has also proven invaluable.

Many of the characteristics of the Big Bang hypothesis can now be measured with relative precision and accuracy by cosmologists.

The history of the universe, according to most cosmologists, can be traced back to 10-21 seconds after the Big Bang, or 0.0000000000000000000001 seconds. Science, on the other hand, will not rest until we push our beliefs even further back in time, to the exact instant when the universe was created.

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