The Universe

MYTHS...
Peples concept of what constitute the universe have changed drastically over the ages. At first the earth was put at the centre of the Universe. The earth was found to be just a planet, and thought sun as the centre, soon sun was found to be an ordinary star, which was part of galaxy, and man began to think that Galaxy was the universe. Now scientist believe that there are many galaxies and that clusters of many galaxies make our universe. Continuing this trend of astonomical upsizing, the latest speculation among astronomers is that may be the universe we know is only one of the many - and that there may be many universes, making a vast super universe.
The universe was called COSMOS, as opposed to chaos, when it was first conceived of as an orederly unit, and the studies relating to the COSMOS were known as Cosmogony or Cosmology. Today, we speak of them as space sciences.
THE ORIGIN - THE BIG BANG THEORY.
Although the Big Bang Theory is widely accepted, it probably will never be proved; consequentially, leaving a number of tough, unanswered questions.
The Big Bang Theory is the dominant scientific theory about the origin of the universe. According to the big bang, the universe was created sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter and in all directions.
In 1927, the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître was the first to propose that the universe began with the explosion of a primeval atom. His proposal came after observing the red shift in distant nebulas by astronomers to a model of the universe based on relativity. Years later, Edwin Hubble found experimental evidence to help justify Lemaître's theory. He found that distant galaxies in every direction are going away from us with speeds proportional to their distance.
The big bang was initially suggested because it explains why distant galaxies are traveling away from us at great speeds. The theory also predicts the existence of cosmic background radiation (the glow left over from the explosion itself).
The Big Bang Theory received its strongest confirmation when this radiation was discovered in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who later won the Nobel Prize for this discovery.