Become a fan of h2g2 How did the universe begin? Or did it
begin? Sir Fred Hoyle didn't think so. He derisively coined the
term the Big Bang. Now Fred Hoyle is dead and the theory is
still alive. 14 billion years ago, give or take a couple billion
years, the universe as we know it wasn't here. Today we believe
we live in an expanding universe. The event which started it all
is known as the Big Bang. Why do we say 14 billion years? Well,
that is an estimate based on 20th Century research. In the early
20th Century, an astronomer called Edwin Hubble made the
discovery that distant stars emitted the same light as close-up
stars (and the Sun), except they appeared more red. What's more,
the more distant the star, the redder the star appeared. He
recalled that another man Vesta M Slipher had found the same
thing in 1912 while researching the spectra of Nebulae. Hubble
reasoned that since the wavelengths of red are longer something
must be stretching them. In 1929 he came up his formula v=Hd to
account for the reds