New Scientist ran an entertaining contest a few days that asked its readers to describe the Big Bang with a single Tweet, which is no small accomplishment given the character limit forced on users. After receiving over 500 submissions, the best of the bunch have been selected, which you’ll find below. Some are quite excellent.

Source: New Scientist

Timeless energy, / all dressed up, no place to go: / had to create space. / – #BigBang #haiku #sci140 – haiQ

God said delB=0 etc, & then light (sym breaking), separation light from darkness (recombination), man created from dirt (evolution) #sci140 – dmadance

#sci140 starburst, molecule, amino acid, protein, cell development, cell division, sex, technology, war, religion, OK magazine. – jonotrumpeto

@newscientist #sci140 Antimatter and matter duke it out. Matter wins 1 billion and one to 1 billion. The matter left expands and makes us. – zeroentropy

@newscientist .<? #sci140 – yanikproulx

#sci140 A place for everything, and everything in one place. Then — kaboom, everything all over the place. – tui4

@newscientist The Big Bang: the moment the universe vanishes when extrapolating its expansion backwards into the past #sci140 – hubi1857

For t<0 some say there was no matter, others say it does not matter. For t>0 its a matter of life and death – as a matter of fact #sci140 – thebeerhunter

an argument between the 9th and 10th dimensions overspilled into the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. #sci140 – AlexStavrinides

The Big Bang: Basically a ballooning of bosons, belatedly bloating into our beautiful universe. Brought to you by the letter ‘B’. #sci140 – CoyoteTrax

Brainiacs at UC Irvine have discovered a cluster of galaxies in the early stages of formation, pegging the age at a whopping 11.4 billion years old, which stands as the new record holder.

“When you observe objects this far away, you are actually seeing the universe as it was a very long time ago,” said Jeff Cooke, a McCue Postdoctoral Fellow in physics and astronomy at UCI and lead author of this study. “It is as if a timeline is just sitting out there in front of you. These galaxies represent what the universe looked like well before the Earth existed.”

“Our finding suggests that this is a monster structure being born in a very bright, catastrophic event with a lot of gas and matter collapsing at once,” Bullock said. “We are not just seeing one solitary galaxy. We are seeing a bunch of bright galaxies coming together at the dawn of structure formation in the universe.”