1Roughly thirteen point eight billion years ago, the entire observable universe was compressed into a region smaller than an atom.
2From that unimaginably hot and dense state, space itself began to expand, carrying matter and energy outwards in every direction.
3During the first few minutes, the lightest elements were forged, and the universe slowly cooled enough for atoms to form.
4For hundreds of millions of years afterwards, there were no stars, only a vast darkness filled with hydrogen gas.
5Gravity patiently gathered this gas into clumps until the pressure within them ignited the first generation of brilliant, short-lived stars.
6These ancient stars manufactured the heavier elements inside their cores and scattered them across space when they finally exploded as supernovae.
7The calcium in your bones and the iron in your blood were created in such furnaces long before the Sun existed.
8Even today, the afterglow of the Big Bang surrounds us as a faint whisper of microwave radiation coming from every direction.
9By carefully measuring this ancient light, cosmologists can reconstruct the youth of the universe with astonishing and steadily improving precision.
10Yet profound mysteries remain, for the invisible dark matter and dark energy that dominate the cosmos still stubbornly defy explanation.
11The story of everything, it seems, has only just begun, and our species holds merely the opening pages.