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We don't know exactly how the universe formed, but the leading idea is the Big Bang theory. This theory states that around 13.77 billion years ago, the universe erupted from one extremely hot and dense point, known as the singularity. This point contained everything. All energy, and the building blocks of matter started here.

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Epochs are our way of denoting different points in the universe's development. Because so much happened so quickly, epochs don't really have a consistent time frame, with some epochs lasting less than a second, and others lasting billions of years. All that really matters is what is going on with the energy in the universe at this time.

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The development of the universe can be separated into two distinct eras, the Nuclear Era and the Matter Era. The Nuclear Era lasted about one minute after the Big Bang, and ended with the first matter, the creation of the element helium. After which the Matter Era began, which includes everything after matter was created.

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The Big Bang happened around 13.77 billion years ago, and was the creation of space. It was not an explosion, but rather space rapidly expanding outwards from the singularity. This kicked off the Nuclear Era, and the first epoch.

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This was the period of time immediately after the Big Bang. It lasted less than a second, and it was so hot and there was so much energy that not even subatomic particles could form. According to the Grand Unification Theory, or GUT, all of the four fundamental forces were at this point one force. As the universe was rapidly cooling, it caused the Grand Unified force to break into other forces as the temperature dropped.

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At the end of the Planck Epoch, gravity had split away from the Grand Unified Force, leaving only weak force, strong force, and electromagnetism unified. This epoch lasted even shorter than the Planck Epoch, with the universe cooling off enough for strong force to begin splitting off from the Grand Unified force a very short while after, starting the next epoch.

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This is the period of time in the early universe when it had cooled off enough for gravity and strong force to split away from the Grand Unified force, but electromagnetism and weak force were still together as electroweak interaction. At the end of this brief epoch, electromagnetism and weak force split away from each other, and the universe began to expand.

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This was a period of rapid expansion for the universe, because the vacuum was so dense with energy, it caused space to expand around it. This was still less than a second after the Big Bang, and the universe still didn't have any light or matter, only space and energy. This energy dense vacuum space expanded at a factor of at least 10^26, which is an incredible amount of space. This allowed the energy to be spread out over space, and the temperature was finally cool enough for particles to form.

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This epoch happened after the inflationary epoch, when the universe was filled with an extremely hot and energetic quark-gluon plasma. Although these particles now existed, they were colliding with too much energy to combine into any larger particles. As the universe continued to cool, this epoch ended, and the next could begin

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This happened twenty microseconds after the Big Bang, as the hot dense quark-gluon plasma that was enveloping the universe started to cool, and the quarks were finally able to combine for the first time into hadrons. In the electroweak epoch, the electroweak force created an imbalance of matter and antimatter, and after the inflationary epoch, the amount of matter in the universe was far greater. Temperatures were initially high enough for matter and antimatter to coexist, and form hadron/anti-hadron pairs that caused annihilation reactions. The annihilation reactions caused the hadrons to become far less common, causing photons and neutrinos to be dominant. Because of the presence of photons, light was finally able to exist.

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When the hadrons were mostly annihilated, leptons became dominant in the universe. This was around one second after the Big Bang, and lasted for about ten seconds. While the temperature of the universe cooled, electron-positron pairs were gradually annihilated, and the next epoch(s) could begin.

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The Big Bang Nucleosynthesis epoch took place between ten seconds to twenty minutes after the Big Bang, and was important because it marks the end of the Nuclear Era and the start of the Matter Era, as helium was formed.

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After helium formed, more and more combinations of particles were combined to make the elements we know today. Motes of cosmic dust had enough gravity to gather the materials around them, more and more came together until they created the first nebulae, nurseries for stars to form. The universe is vast and ancient, and we don't have all the answers yet, but our technology is getting better and better, and soon we may be able to peer further into the ancient past and discover more about the history of the universe.