Cosmic Timeline

The cosmic timeline, from the origin of the known Universe in the Big Bang, 13.8 Billion years ago, until present day. Shown are major events based on the current standard picture. After the Big Bang, the Universe underwent “Inflation”, a period of accelerated expansion that expanded the Universe by around 60 orders of magnitude. The Universe then kept expanding and cooling until the next major epoch of “Recombination”, when the first hydrogen atoms formed about 400’000 years later. After the subsequent “Dark ages” of the Universe that lasted for a few hundred Million years, the emergence of the earliest galaxies marked the start of the era of “Cosmic dawn”. Within the first galaxies, the first photons were produced and were capable of ionising the neutral hydrogen atoms permeating space. This then started the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR), the most recent major phase transition in the Universe. Isolated galaxies (light dots) produced ionised regions (roundish patches) in the initial stages of reionisation that grew and merged until the Universe was fully re-ionised. 

A graphic by the DELPHI project (ERC 717001) is included in the current illustration. The final graphic was developed during the breakthrough workshop ‘The Chronology of the Very Early Universe According to JWST: The First Billion Years‘ at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland.

• Series: ISSI Breakthrough Workshop 2024 (issibt24)
• Creator: Fabio Crameri
• This version: 08.06.2024
• License: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Specific citation: This graphic by Fabio Crameri (ISSI Bern) published in ISSI Breakthrough Workshop team (2024) is available via the open-access s-ink.org repository.
• Related reference: ISSI Breakthrough Workshop 2024 team (2024, pre-print), arXiv, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2405.21054

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