The consensus among cosmologists is that the visible universe erupted out of a singular event 13.7 billion years ago.

Within the first microsecond, the universe was an unimaginably hot soup of quarks and other exotic particles. As the soup cooled, quarks condensed into protons and neutrons and their cousins, hadrons and mesons.

One second later, only neutrons, protons, photons, electrons, and neutrinos (three types of lightweight elementary particles and their antiparticle counterparts) remained. A series of nuclear reactions over the next 200 seconds created the nuclei of the three smallest elements.

Sound waves from the fading echo of the Big Bang rippled through the incredibly hot and dense fluid of the infant universe like ripples in a lake. Pulled by the positively charged protons, a dense swarm of negatively charged free electrons accompanied the ebb and flow of the soup. Collisions with these electrically charged species coralled and herded the photons along. When the universe reached its 380,000th birthday it had cooled enough for atoms to form. That set the photons free, and the universe was suddenly transparent. The liberated photons carried fossil imprints of the early universe's density and temperature fluctuations as a pattern of brightness variation, called 'relic radiation,' first observed by Penzias and Wilson and coined the 'cosmic microwave background' or CMB (at a temperature of averagely 2.7 degrees Celsius above absolute Zero, or 2.7 kelvins.

WMAP revealed the age, composition, and shape of the cosmos.

WMAP - Wilkinson Microwave Anistrpy Probe (a NASA orbtiting laboratory).

It was launched June 30, 2001, and has provided an unprecedented overview of the universe as it was 380,000 years after the Big Bang, just after the opaque soup of atom fragments combined for the first time into atoms.

They have also determined that the first stars began to appear 200 million years after the Big bang.

Also pinpointed the exact proportions of the cosmos: 4% normal matter, 23% dark matter, and 73% dark energy. These figures indicate that the universe is flat and will most likely expand forever.

http://cossc.gsfc.nasa.gov/epo/brochures/new_win/nw3.html

http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/pr...se.html?1132005

Probing the Large Scale Structure of the Universe....

"Humanity must rise above the Earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond,
for only then will we fully understand the world in which we live."

~ Socrates - 500 B.C. ~

Socrates was one cool cat. Prescient.