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Figure 1: A historical time-line showing the major evolutionary stages of our Universe according to the standard model, from the earliest moments of the Planck era to the present. The horizontal axis represents logarithmic time in seconds (or equivalently energy in electron-Volts or temperature in Kelvin), and the solid red line roughly models the radius of the Universe, showing the different rates of expansion at different times: exponential during inflation, shallow power law during the radiation dominated era, and a somewhat steeper power law during the current matter dominated phase. |