What was there BEFORE the "Big Bang"?

Yeah, corny..... everyone knows that with no air, there's no sound!

E = mc 2 E / c 2 = m E = energy, m = mass, c = speed of light (299,792,458 meters/sec.)

Initially after the Big Bang, everything was pure energy Ultimately, subatomic particles coalesce to create protons, neutrons and electrons……. Even then, energy levels are so high that protons and neutrons bounce off each other. Eventually, they cool down enough to be able to fuse, forming Deuterium, or 2 H deuterium colliding with a neutron produces tritium, which can combine with another proton to produce helium-4.

Initially, matter was distributed surprisingly uniformly throughout the Universe, as much of it remains today.

The nebulae gradually collapse and commonly start rotating, to form galaxies, like the Andromeda Galaxy, pictured here. (Note the other galaxies also in the picture!) The first GALAXIES were probably forming within 1 billion years of the Big Bang. How many stars in a galaxy? Milky Way: 200 billion; Andromeda: 1 TRILLION!

How many galaxies are out there?

Galaxies aren't always completely isolated, either, but can interact!

The Doppler effect From the amount of the red shift in their light spectra, we can tell how rapidly distant galaxies are moving away from us. This is also why the discovery of new galaxies farther away than any others is of major importance!

Individual large pockets of gas within the spinning disc of a galaxy can create stars, if they have sufficient mass (i.e., ~10x the size of Jupiter).

here BUT here, the original star didn't last …. It gradually burned out, and then exploded in what is called aSUPERNOVA …. creating a new nebula that included much heavier elements than the old original star - elements above iron in the Periodic Table of the Elements (the transferric elements). Much of our hydrogen and helium was lost to space, only some remaining in what would become the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, etc.).

Heavier debris coalescing within this gas cloud produced solids, that coalesced into small bodies called planetesimals…. …. that then further coalesced to form larger solid bodies - planets - rotating around a central star …. the Sun.

Iron