Since the beginning of human history, there have been questions about where the "stuff" that composes our universe comes from. In cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, theories are put forward to explain the known facts and assumptions about the stars and everything we know and sense.
There are "steady state" theories that propose that everything in the universe is pretty much the way it always has been. The steady state theory posits that the universe is contained within a "closed" system, and so the assumption could be made that the universe extends for a vast though finite distance in all directions. However, in 1823 a German cosmologist named Wilhelm Olbers asked the question, "Why is the sky dark at night?" Olbers pointed out that if the universe extended nearly forever and stars were distributed evenly throughout it, we would eventually see a star no matter what direction we looked in. Thus the sky should be bright at night, in contradiction to what we observe (Pasachoff, 1981, 64).
There is also the "big bang" theory, so named because it supposes that at some time in the dim past, all the matter and energy in the universe were contained in one super-dense point. Most of the inconsistencies and observed phenomena that do not support a "steady state" theory of the universe, tend to support the "big bang" theory of the universe. At least that is how cosmologists and scientists construe the facts they are continually uncovering and correlating.
Through Albert Einstein's special general theory of relativity in 1906, which included constants for mass, energy, and speed, it became clear to a number of scientists, that the curvature of space was a reality, and thus several unexplained aspects of the universe began to resolve (Van Norstrand's, 1984, 800). Observed phenomena like the periodicy of Mercury's orbit and the red shift of light from different stars and galaxies seemed to have a c...