What comes before the universe?

Answer 1

In ancient Greek and Roman myths,it was believed that the goddess hera (juno)split milk across the sky and called the white streak it left "river of milk". The Romans call it ViaLactea or a "road made of milk". This is how our galaxycame to be named the Milky Way.

Answer 2

Galaxies are probably formed from a gigantic cloud of gas that begins to collapse and rotate due to the force of gravity. This rotating gas cloud is where stars form, and eventually a galaxy takes shape.

Answer 3

The concept of "before" implies a time reference, but time itself is believed to have begun with the Big Bang that created the universe. Therefore, there is no agreed upon concept of what existed "before" the universe.

Answer 4

It depends on what you mean by "discovered." The Milky Way has been known since pre-history. Several philosophers theorized that it was made up of a large number of individual faint stars, but Galileo Galilei was the first to actually demonstrate this by observing it through a telescope. Heber Curtis (whom you've probably never heard of) was the main proponent of the idea that the Milky Way was just one of many galaxies instead of being the entire universe. Edwin Hubble (the guy the telescope is named for) demonstrated conclusively that Curtis was right by showing that stars in what had previously been called "spiral nebulae" were far too distant to be part of the Milky Way.

The Greeks did they had seen a white band across the sky.

" In 1610 Galileo described his telescopic observations of the Milky Way, which showed it to be a multitude of individual stars. In 1750 Thomas Wright published a speculative explanation[...]".
The Greek philosopher Democitus

Answer 5

That's an EXCELLENT question. You deserve an excellent answer.

Unfortunately, the only HONEST answer is "We don't know." Yet. We have competing, disorganized theories about something that happened (we think!) about 14.5 billion years ago. Talk about a "cold case!"

The fundamental description of "scientist" is a person who, when he doesn't know the answer to a question, says "I don't know".

I suspect that we will continue to pull together the threads of the answer for many hundreds of years in the future. I also suspect that we will not find the answers we seek here so deep in the Sun's gravity well, but out there between the stars.

Answer 6

Probably not a "who", in the sense of an entity who guided creation; the basic physics of gravity caused the formation of clumps of matter, which over a billion years or so would have formed galaxies.

Answer 7

Era, Jupiter's wife was milking one of her children when her boosom let go a squirt of divine milk. All those tiny droplets became the Milky Way in heaven. The Milky Way is the 'horizontal' view of the galaxy, whose scattered stars in fact look like a huge squirt of milk droplets.

Answer 8

The universe was believed to be created by an explosion called the big bang. Everything i n space (universes, solar systems, stars, etc.) was thought to be an incredibly dense (high mass, but small size) object about the size of a pencil tip. Because this object was so small, but so dense, it exploded due to strong friction it created. Everything that exists today originated directly or indirectly from that explosion, and the universes today are still believed to be moving and spreading apart. Proof of this expansion is explained by Doppler shift. Red shift means that things are moving away from us, and blue is coming towards us.

Answer 9

Roughly speaking, in the early Universe matter gathered together due to its own gravity. Dark matter may have played an important role in this. For a more detailed analysis, check the Wikipedia article on "Galaxy formation and evolution".

Answer 10

Over 400 billion stars, gas, dust, rock and ice

Recent estimates indicate that there may be over a trillion stars in the Milly Way; because red dwarf stars are so small and dim, there are probably many more of them than we used to think there were.