Teach Astronomy - Planck Era

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Given our knowledge of the fundamental forces of nature, cosmologists speculate about an early phase of the universe on an unimaginable iota of time after the big bang, ten to the minus forty three seconds after the big bang, when the forces of nature were all equal. This is called the Planck era or the Planck epoch after one of the founding figures of quantum mechanics. In this tiny instant of time after the big bang the temperature was ten to the power thirty-two Kelvin. The size of the universe was ten to the minus thirty-five meters, much smaller than a proton. The universe was a seething space time foam where there was no distinction between particles and energy or even between particles and the space they occupy. This represents the limit to our knowledge. With no current theory for the quantum nature of gravity, astronomers can only speculate what the universe was like at the instant of its creation.