Buy this book on Amazon: A Short History of the World
There is general consensus among members of the scientific community that the universe in which we live burst into existence following a cataclysmic explosion, or ‘Big Bang’, 13.7 billion years ago. The swirling masses of matter and energy that resulted from this Big Bang were pulled together by electrostatic forces over the coming billions of years to form galaxies, stars and planets, including the planet on which we live.
Incredible distances exist between galaxies. Earth is a small planet in a galaxy we call the Milky Way. Nobody knows exactly how many stars there are in the Milky Way, but estimates range from 100 billion to 400 billion. What’s more, there are purportedly at least 100 billion other galaxies in the known universe. That is a lot of stars and an incredible amount of space if you consider that the average distance between two stars is roughly 30 trillion miles.
About 4.5 billion years ago, gaseous, solid, and other matter pulled together to form planet Earth. A few hundred million years later it is thought that a huge object, or maybe even a planet, crashed into Earth and blew out enough matter to form a satellite body which then became our moon. After this literally earth-shattering event, Earth took millions of years to cool down.
A bombardment of meteors may have brought water to Earth in the form of ice. As the planet’s crust cooled, water vapour emitted from volcanoes condensed and accumulated as oceans after rain from the newly formed atmosphere no longer evaporated on the planet’s hot surface.