Question

How and why does the CMBR, redshifts of distant galaxies, and relative abundances of the elements support a beginning to our universe?

About 380,000 years after the big bang, the universe became transparent to light. What had to occur for this to happen and what remnant is left behind that we can see today?

Go to Planck and The Cosmic Microwave Background and answer the following: How accurate is the the Planck data? What do the different colors help us know about the universe we see today?

How do we detect a red-shifted or blue-shifted galaxy? What is a "z" number and how is it calculated?

Answer 1

CMBR : Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation , Redshifts of distant galaxies, and relative abundancies of the elements support a beginning of out universe at a finite point of time as follows :

a. COsmic Microwave Background Radiation is the radiation that was emitted when the big bang occured and all the matter exploded at hyperinflation ( very high speed). due to the high temperatures at that point of time, the radiation emitted had a lot of energy. this radiation has travelled from the center of the universe to all the directions over millenia and lost its energy over time to reach microwave wavelengths and this tells about the existance of big bang

b. Redshifts of distant galaxies shows us the fact that all the galaxies are moving far away from each other, and hence due to the doppler's effect in light, the light emmitted from these galaxies appears to be red shifted. this shows that when everything is moving away from each other (like dots on baloon surface being inflated) then it all must have started from somewhere, and hence again hinting towards the starting of the universe to be the big bang

c. relative abundancies of the elements in various spots of universe tells us the life of that object, because since we know that the first element to be produced during big bang was hydrogen and over time this hydrogen has fused time and again to form heavier elements. so heavier elements and their relative abundance shows us that the spot in universe where the relative abundancies of the elements were being studied, instead of having hydrogen concentration at 100% has concentration of other elements as well and by counting this we can arrive at a figure so as to how many years old is this spot of universe. since we can put an age to it, it hints towards origin of universe.

Roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, matter cooled enough for atoms to form during the era of recombination, resulting in a transparent, electrically neutral gas. Thus for the space to become transparent for light, it had to allow light to pass through it unaffected. this happened once the surrounding matter cooled down and charged ions recombined to form neutral gas. thus neutral gases did not interact with the light making the space transparent. The cosmic background radiation is the remenant of this light that we can see today