How large was the universe about 10^-34 seconds after the Big Bang?

Just before the proposed Epoch of Inflation, it is believed that the 'patch' out of which our space-time emerged was only about 10^-24 centimeters across. That's ten billion times smaller than the diameter of the nucleus of an atom.

After inflation ended some 10^-33 seconds or so following the Big Bang, this little patch stretched in size until it had a characteristic scale of 10s of centimeters. Thereafter, it expanded according to standard Big Bang theory until today, after 15 billion years, this same patch is literally trillions of times bigger than our entire visible universe.

All the other patches that neighbored ours just before Inflation, presumably evolved in slightly different ways to create possibly their own humongous patches today, but with physical conditions that may be a little ( or a lot) different than what we see around us. Astronomers in these other patches may wonder why the cosmic background radiation has a temperature of 3.7 K or 15.1 K rather than our value of 2.7 K.


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