Question: if the universe was made by a big bang how were all the atoms and particles created to make the big bang.also how is everything black out there in space,because it must of started somewhere but i just cant understand it.thankyou for taking your time to answer this queston

Dave Sproson answered on 15 Jun 2011:

This is a loooong way from my field of expertise – but I’ll answer as best as I can!

Exactly how the universe came into being is one of the big mysteries of modern science: maybe it will be solved one day, but for the moment it’s very much an unanswered question.

Another really big mystery is that current theories suggest that matter and anti-matter should have been produced in equal amounts. When matter and anti-matter meet, they destroy each other and turn to pure energy. So why hasn’t this happened – why does the universe have any ‘stuff’ in it? There must have been a tiny bit more matter created than anti-matter created, so what we see today as everything in the universe is actually the tiny amount of the stuff that wasn’t destroyed by its anti-counterpart just after the big bang. It’s crazy to think that almost all of the matter the whole universe was destroyed!

Space looks black purely because black is the colour we see when there’s no light. Space *is* actually full of light produced by the heat left over from the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background. Finding this light was one of the things that pretty much proved the big bang theory correct – it was predicted by the theory before it was observed. The reason we don’t see it — and so why space looks black — is that our eyes aren’t sensitive to that frequency of light (and also it’s really really really dim!).