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The chronology of the universe describes the history and future of the universe according to Big Bang cosmology.. Research published in 2015 estimates the earliest stages of the universe's existence as taking place 13.8 billion years ago, with an uncertainty of around 21 million years at the 68% confidence level.
1998 – Discovery of accelerating universe. [13] 2000 – Data from several cosmic microwave background experiments give strong evidence that the Universe is "flat" (space is not curved, although space-time is), with important implications for the formation of large-scale structure.
1959 – Explorer 6 sends the first image of the entire Earth from space. [178] 1959 – Luna 3 sends the first images of another celestial body, the Moon, from space, including its unseen far side. [179] 1962 – Mariner 2 Venus flyby performs the first closeup observations of another planet. [180]
Global geometry: This pertains to the universe's overall shape and structure. The observable universe (of a given current observer) is a roughly spherical region extending about 46 billion light-years in all directions (from that observer, the observer being the current Earth, unless specified otherwise). [3]
The timeline of the universe begins with the Big Bang, 13.799 ± 0.021 billion years ago, [1] and follows the formation and subsequent evolution of the Universe up to the present day. Each era or age of the universe begins with an " epoch ", a time of significant change.
Because humans cannot observe space beyond the edge of the observable universe, it is unknown whether the size of the universe in its totality is finite or infinite. [3] [57] [58] Estimates suggest that the whole universe, if finite, must be more than 250 times larger than a Hubble sphere. [59]
c. 16th century BCE – Mesopotamian cosmology has a flat, circular Earth enclosed in a cosmic ocean. [1]c. 15th–11th century BCE – The Rigveda of Hinduism has some cosmological hymns, particularly in the late book 10, notably the Nasadiya Sukta which describes the origin of the universe, originating from the monistic Hiranyagarbha or "Golden Egg".
Since the universe is expanding, the equation for that expansion can be "run backwards" to its starting point. The Lambda-CDM concordance model describes the expansion of the universe from a very uniform, hot, dense primordial state to its present state over a span of about 13.77 billion years [12] of cosmological time.