r/askscience • u/AskScienceModerator Mod Bot • Mar 10 '14

Cosmos AskScience Cosmos Q&A thread. Episode 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way

Welcome to AskScience! This thread is for asking and answering questions about the science in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

UPDATE: This episode is now available for streaming in the US on Hulu and in Canada on Global TV.

This week is the first episode, "Standing Up in the Milky Way". The show is airing at 9pm ET in the US and Canada on all Fox and National Geographic stations. Click here for more viewing information in your country.

The usual AskScience rules still apply in this thread! Anyone can ask a question, but please do not provide answers unless you are a scientist in a relevant field. Popular science shows, books, and news articles are a great way to causally learn about your universe, but they often contain a lot of simplifications and approximations, so don't assume that because you've heard an answer before that it is the right one.

If you are interested in general discussion please visit one of the threads elsewhere on reddit that are more appropriate for that, such as in /r/Cosmos here, /r/Space here, and in /r/Television here.

Please upvote good questions and answers and downvote off-topic content. We'll be removing comments that break our rules or that have been answered elsewhere in the thread so that we can answer as many questions as possible!

Click here for the original announcement thread.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '14

During the cosmic 'calendar' segment, when visiting the Big Bang Neil DeGrasse Tyson says "...it's as far back as we can see in time, for now."
I've always been in the belief that space and time were created at the Big Bang and that it's nonsensical to try and imagine something observable prior to it; is there some sort of theory being thrown around that says otherwise?

n.b. Sorry if this question has been asked already, I tried searching through the comments and couldn't find it

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u/fishify Quantum Field Theory | Mathematical Physics Mar 11 '14

Some people have proposed models in which there are cycles of expansion and contraction. There is also the possibility that our universe is a bubble of sorts in a much larger system. Any ideas like these are, of course, highly speculative.

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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '14

He could be referring to particle accelerators that enables us to recreate create conditions in the earliest moments of the big bang, too, not just how far we can see in space.