Chronology in five stages
For the purposes of this summary, it is convenient to divide the chronology of the universe since it originated, into five parts. It is generally considered meaningless or unclear whether See more

After cosmic inflation ends, the universe is filled with a hot quark–gluon plasma, the remains of reheating. From this point onwards the physics … See more

370 thousand to about 1 billion years after the Big Bang
Dark Ages
After recombination and decoupling, the universe was … See more

The Standard Model of cosmology is based on a model of spacetime called the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) metric See more

During the earliest moments of cosmic time, the energies and conditions were so extreme that current knowledge can only suggest possibilities, which may turn out to be incorrect. To give one example, eternal inflation theories propose that inflation lasts forever … See more

The universe has appeared much the same as it does now, for many billions of years. It will continue to look similar for many more billions of … See more

There are several competing scenarios for the long-term evolution of the universe. Which of them will happen, if any, depends on the precise values of physical constants such as the cosmological constant, the possibility of proton decay, the See more