Cosmology: The Study of the Universe and its

Origins
Looking for the big picture? It doesnt get any bigger than cosmology: the science of how the universe
began and developed. What is it made of? How is it structured? What is its eventual fate, billions of
years in the future? Supercomputer models and observations from ever-larger telescopes on the
ground and in space have transformed cosmology into a predictive science, providing evidence that
the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, propelled by a mysterious pressure called dark
energy. The Hayden Planetarium Space Show Dark Universe explores this new age of cosmic
discovery.
A gravitational singularity or space-time singularity is a location in space-time where the gravitational field of a
celestial body becomes infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system. The quantities used to
measure gravitational field strength are the scalar invariant curvatures of space-time, which includes a measure of
the density of matter. Since such quantities become infinite within the singularity, the laws of normal space-time
cannot exist.[1][2]
Gravitational singularities are mainly considered within general relativity, where density apparently becomes infinite
at the center of a black hole, and within astrophysics and cosmology as the earliest state of the universe during
the Big Bang. Physicists are undecided whether the prediction of singularities means that they actually exist (or
existed at the start of the Big Bang), or that current knowledge is insufficient to describe what happens at such
extreme densities.
In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of
exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from 1036 seconds after the
conjectured Big Bang singularity to sometime between 1033and 1032 seconds after the singularity. Following the
inflationary period, the Universe continues to expand, but at a less rapid rate. [1]
Inflation theory was first developed by Alan Guth at Cornell in 1979. It developed further in the early 1980s. It
explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary
region, magnified to cosmic size, become the seeds for the growth of structure in the Universe (see galaxy formation
and evolution and structure formation).[2] Many physicists also believe that inflation explains why the Universe
appears to be the same in all directions (isotropic), why the cosmic microwave background radiation is distributed
evenly, why the Universe is flat, and why no magnetic monopoles have been observed.
In particle physics, annihilation is the process that occurs when a subatomic particle collides with its
respective antiparticle to produce other particles, such as an electron colliding with a positron to produce
two photons.[1] The total energy and momentum of the initial pair are conserved in the process, and, more generally
are distributed among a set of other particles in the final state. Antiparticles have exactly opposite additive quantum
numbers from particles, so the sums of all quantum numbers of such an original pair are zero. Hence, any set of
particles may be produced whose total quantum numbers are also zero as long as conservation of
energy and conservation of momentum are obeyed.[2]
During a low-energy annihilation, photon production is favored, since these particles have no mass. However, high-
energy particle collidersproduce annihilations where a wide variety of exotic heavy particles are created.
The word annihilation may also be used informally for the interaction of two particles that are not mutual antiparticles
(not charge conjugate). Some quantum numbers may then not sum to zero in the initial state, but must be
conserved, with the same totals in the final state. An example is the "annihilation" of a high-energy electron
antineutrino with an electron to produce a
W
.
If the annihilating particles are composite, such as mesons or baryons, then several different particles are typically
produced in the final state.