ASTRO-110 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Electroweak Interaction, Pair Production, Nucleosynthesis
Document Summary
Electroweak era: the hot soup of elementary particles continued to cool as the universe expanded. the electroweak era began when the electroweak force separated from the strong force. At the end of this era, quarks could no longer exist freely and temperatures were hot enough to create protons and neutrons in random quantum fluctuations and pair creation. For the next 300,000 years our universe consisted of a hot plasma of hydrogen and helium ions. Universe is optically opaque cant see through it **why we can"t see to the beginning of the universe. We can never see back before the movement of recombination. there were simply no photons free to travel to us, but we do see the moment of recombination. The big bang the era of atoms: What remains is the formation of stars, galaxies, etc. which we looked at in depth. Now focus on three issues of the early universe: inflation: recombination, nucleosynthesis.
