re: Do you accept the notion of the Big Bang as the origin of our universe?

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About 300,000 years after the big bang, the universe was like a smoke-filled chamber from which light could not escape. By the time the universe was a billion years old, the smoke—actually a gas of light-trapping hydrogen—had cleared almost entirely, allowing stars and galaxies to become visible. But exactly what cut through the haze has been one of the big questions in astrophysics. Now, by analyzing images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers have come close to confirming their best guess: the smoke was cleared away by a blaze of ultraviolet radiation from the earliest galaxies.

About 300,000 years after the big bang, the first atoms formed as protons combined with electrons to make hydrogen. Because hydrogen atoms trap light, the young universe entered its "dark ages." Then about a billion years later, some sort of radiation had ionized the hydrogen, turning it into a transparent broth of electrons and ions over a period of several hundred million years; the period is known as the Epoch of Reionization.

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