 Here's a summary of the Big Bang Timeline. Quantum mechanics has a notion of a smallest length called Planck length. It's theoretically impossible to determine the difference between two locations less than one Planck length apart. This gives us a smallest possible time interval called Planck time. It's the time it would take light to cover the Planck length. It gives us the highest possible temperature called the Planck temperature. We'll start here. Cosmic inflation created a radiation-only universe that cooled into a quark plasma following an exponential expansion. Baryogenesis turned the quark plasma into baryons, eliminating antimatter. Neutrino decoupling freed neutrinos to travel across the universe. Nucleosynthesis filled the universe with hydrogen and helium. The photon epoch was the long time period that followed nucleosynthesis. The universe was filled with a hot, opaque plasma of photons, atomic nuclei, electrons, and dark matter. Recombination united electrons with protons, creating a sea of hydrogen and helium atoms filling the universe. Photon decoupling freed photons to travel across the universe. At this time, the entire sky was as bright as the surface of our sun. The sky darkened as the expanding universe stretched the bright surface of last scattering radiation into the infrared range. With no stars having formed to give off light, the universe literally went dark. During this time, the caustic process worked the dark matter into filaments with the baryonic matter tagging along. During this time, the universe left thermal equilibrium. Eventually, the dense clouds of cosmic gas in the filaments started to collapse under their own gravity, becoming hot enough to trigger nuclear fusion reactions between hydrogen atoms, creating the very first stars. Galaxies of stars formed in gravitational attraction pull these galaxies towards each other to form groups, clusters, and galaxy superclusters. Our sun is a late generation star, incorporating the debris from many generations of earlier stars. It and its solar system formed roughly 8.5 to 9 billion years after the Big Bang. Today, the universe is dominated by vacuum energy and is expanding in an accelerating rate. Eventually, everything gravitationally bound will be in a galaxy and all other galaxies will be beyond the visible horizon. CMB radiation will disappear. No intelligent species will be able to detect that they exist in a universe bigger than their own galaxy. In addition, all star fuel will eventually run out and the universe will go dark. Forever.