Bang! I never thought I would say this but right now I wouldn’t mind being Richard Hammond. It has nothing to do with his fast cars (though I wouldn’t complain if he gave me one). it is his new show on the BBC about the universe! I am a “see it, touch it, believe it” type so thinking about the size of our universe and how it all began makes my brain feel like exploding... a bit like my own personal big bang. The Big Bang is the term scientists use to describe the event that kick-started our universe about 13 billion years ago. For reasons we don’t fully understand a tiny, super-hot and excitable bubble that contained mainly hydrogen, with a dash of helium and lithium, burst.

This enormous bang sent super hot gases zooming through space in all directions.

Just like a balloon over-filled with water that suddenly bursts, the contents initially moved outwards very fast then the further they spread the slower they got. The hydrogen and other gases cooled, slowed down and settled into stars and eventually galaxies including ours with our beautiful solar system.

Stars acted like factories for the production of new molecules from the original gases.

These molecules became the building blocks of life. It is a bit mind-blowing to think that absolutely everything we can see around us came from that one moment in time – that your body and mine and the dog up the road are all made from the same materials found in stars.

To back up the Big Bang Theory, scientists have taken observations of life and the universe today and pressed rewind all the way back to the start. So we get to the first frozen frame of this theory with good evidence but what happened just before that?

What was the prelude to the Big Bang? Was there just a random bubble floating in endless nothingness?

This seems unlikely and is the topic of much research.

Scientists are trying to recreate that first freeze frame by smashing hydrogen atoms together to see what other particles we might be able to see.

JET, down at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, is applying a huge amount of heat to make hydrogen atoms fuse together – the same reaction that happens in stars. There is another job I wouldn’t mind – chief star maker!

The universe is still expanding and the more we understand about how this all started the easier it will be for us to predict what might happen in future.

One thing is for certain the Big Bang Theory captures something in our imaginations.

It has lent its name to the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory (which annoyingly goes down the men are geeks, girls are bimbo’s route) and you can even get a taste of your own big banger right here in Oxford at the ever popular sausage festival at the Oxford Castle!