AST 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Nucleosynthesis, Planck Units, Cosmic Microwave Background

• School: Tunxis Community College
• Department: Astronomy
• Course: AST 111
• Professor: Reynolds

Document Summary

The first era after the big bang. Substantial energy fluctuations from point to point during this time, generating a rapidly changing gravitational field that would have randomly warped space and time. We do not yet understand the physics of the universe well enough to describe what it was like. At the end of the planck era, the super force split into the gut force and gravity. Ends when gut force split into strong and electroweak. Energy released near the end of the gut era may have caused a dramatic expansion of the universe known as inflation. Presence of gravity, strong fore, and electroweak fore. Elementary particles appeared spontaneously from energy, but also transformed rapidly back into energy. Experimental evidence supports the current theory of the universe since the end of the electroweak era, but there is no direct evidence about earlier times.