Earth is unique among the known planets: it has an abundance of water.

Other worlds — including a

few moons — have atmospheres, ice, and even oceans, but only Earth has the right combination to
sustain life.

Earth's oceans cover about 70 percent of the planet's surface with an average depth of 2.5 miles (4
kilometers). Fresh water exists in liquid form in lakes and rivers and as water vapor in the atmosphere,
which causes much of Earth's weather.

You can think of the Earth as being made up of a number of layers, sort of like an onion. These layers
get denser the closer to the center of the earth you get. Four main layers of the earth: the crust,
mantle, outer core, and inner core. 

Crust
The crust is the thin outer later of the Earth where we live. Well, it looks thin on the picture and
it is thin relative to the other layers, but don't worry, we're not going to fall through by accident anytime
soon. The crust varies from around 5km thick (in the ocean floor) to around 70km thick (on land where
we live called the continental crust). The continental crust is made up of rocks that consist primarily of
silica and alumina called the "sial". 

Mantle
The mantle under the crust is about 1,800 miles deep (2,890 km). It is composed mostly of
silicate rocks rich in magnesium and iron. Intense heat causes the rocks to rise. They then cool and
sink back down to the core. This convection — like a lava lamp — is believed to be what causes the
tectonic plates to move. When the mantle pushes through the crust, volcanoes erupt.

Outer Core
The Earth's outer core is made up of iron and nickel and is very hot (4400 to 5000+ degrees
C). This is so hot that the iron and nickel metals are liquid! The outer core is very important to earth as
it creates something called a magnetic field. The magnetic field the outer core creates goes way out in
to space and makes a protective barrier around the earth that shields us from the sun's damaging
solar wind. 

Inner Core
The Earth's inner core is made up of iron and nickel, just like the outer core, however, the inner
core is different. The inner core is so deep within the earth that it's under immense pressure. So much
pressure that, even though it is so hot, it is solid. The inner core is the hottest part of the Earth, and, at
over 5000 degrees C, is about as hot as the surface of the sun. 

The structure of Earth can be defined in two ways: by mechanical properties such as rheology, or
chemically. Mechanically, it can be divided into lithosphere, asthenosphere, mesospheric
mantle, outer core, and the inner core. The interior of Earth is divided into 5 important layers.
Chemically, Earth can be divided into the crust, upper mantle, lower mantle, outer core, and inner
core. The geologic component layers of Earth are at the following depths below the surface:
 Depth

Kilometres Miles Layer

0–60 0–37 Lithosphere (locally varies between 5 and 200 km)

0–35 0–22 … Crust (locally varies between 5 and 70 km)

35–60 22–37 … Uppermost part of mantle

35–2,890 22–1,790 Mantle

210-270 100-200 … Upper mesosphere (upper mantle)

660–2,890 410–1,790 … Lower mesosphere (lower mantle)

2,890–5,150 1,790–3,160 Outer core

5,150–6,360 3,160–3,954 Inner core

Big bang Theory

The Big Bang theory is an effort to explain what happened at the very beginning of our
universe. Discoveries in astronomy and physics have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that our
universe did in fact have a beginning. Prior to that moment there was nothing; during and after that
moment there was something: our universe. The big bang theory is an effort to explain what happened
during and after that moment. 

According to the standard theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7
billion years ago. What is a "singularity" and where does it come from? Well, to be honest, we don't
know for sure. Singularities are zones which defy our current understanding of physics. They are
thought to exist at the core of "black holes." Black holes are areas of intense gravitational pressure.
The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density (a
mathematical concept which truly boggles the mind). These zones of infinite density are called
"singularities." Our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, infinitely
dense, something - a singularity. Where did it come from? We don't know. Why did it appear? We
don't know. 

After its initial appearance, it apparently inflated (the "Big Bang"), expanded and cooled, going
from very, very small and very, very hot, to the size and temperature of our current universe. It
continues to expand and cool to this day and we are inside of it: incredible creatures living on a unique
planet, circling a beautiful star clustered together with several hundred billion other stars in a galaxy
soaring through the cosmos, all of which is inside of an expanding universe that began as an
infinitesimal singularity which appeared out of nowhere for reasons unknown. This is the Big Bang
theory.

Big Bang Theory - Evidence for the Theory

what are the major evidences which support the Big Bang theory?

 First of all, we are reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning.
 Second, galaxies appear to be moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance. This
is called "Hubble's Law," named after Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who discovered this
 phenomenon in 1929. This observation supports the expansion of the universe and suggests that
the universe was once compacted.
 Third, if the universe was initially very, very hot as the Big Bang suggests, we should be able to
find some remnant of this heat. In 1965, Radioastronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson
discovered a 2.725 degree Kelvin (-454.765 degree Fahrenheit, -270.425 degree Celsius) Cosmic
Microwave Background radiation (CMB) which pervades the observable universe. This is thought
to be the remnant which scientists were looking for. Penzias and Wilson shared in the 1978 Nobel
Prize for Physics for their discovery.
 Finally, the abundance of the "light elements" Hydrogen and Helium found in the observable
universe are thought to support the Big Bang model of origins.

The Expanding Universe

For thousands of years, astronomers wrestled with basic questions about the size and age of the
universe. Does the universe go on forever, or does it have an edge somewhere? Has it always
existed, or did it come to being sometime in the past? In 1929, Edwin Hubble, an astronomer at
Caltech, made a critical discovery that soon led to scientific answers for these questions: he
discovered that the universe is expanding.
The ancient Greeks recognized that it was difficult to imagine what an infinite universe might look like.
But they also wondered that if the universe were finite, and you stuck out your hand at the edge,
where would your hand go? The Greeks' two problems with the universe represented a paradox - the
universe had to be either finite or infinite, and both alternatives presented problems.
After the rise of modern astronomy, another paradox began to puzzle astronomers. In the early 1800s,
German astronomer Heinrich Olbers argued that the universe must be finite. If the Universe were
infinite and contained stars throughout, Olbers said, then if you looked in any particular direction, your
line-of-sight would eventually fall on the surface of a star. Although the apparent size of a star in the
sky becomes smaller as the distance to the star increases, the brightness of this smaller surface
remains a constant. Therefore, if the Universe were infinite, the whole surface of the night sky should
be as bright as a star. Obviously, there are dark areas in the sky, so the universe must be finite.
But, when Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity, he realized that gravity is always attractive.
Every object in the universe attracts every other object. If the universe truly were finite, the attractive
forces of all the objects in the universe should have caused the entire universe to collapse on itself.
This clearly had not happened, and so astronomers were presented with a paradox.
When Einstein developed his theory of gravity in the General Theory of Relativity, he thought he ran
into the same problem that Newton did: his equations said that the universe should be either
expanding or collapsing, yet he assumed that the universe was static. His original solution contained a
constant term, called the cosmological constant, which cancelled the effects of gravity on very large
scales, and led to a static universe. After Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, Einstein
called the cosmological constant his "greatest blunder."
At around the same time, larger telescopes were being built that were able to accurately measure the
spectra, or the intensity of light as a function of wavelength, of faint objects. Using these new data,
astronomers tried to understand the plethora of faint, nebulous objects they were observing. Between
1912 and 1922, astronomer Vesto Slipher at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona discovered that the
spectra of light from many of these objects was systematically shifted to longer wavelengths, or
redshifted. A short time later, other astronomers showed that these nebulous objects were distant
galaxies.
The Discovery of the Expanding Universe
Meanwhile, other physicists and mathematicians working on Einstein's theory of gravity
discovered the equations had some solutions that described an expanding universe. In these
solutions, the light coming from distant objects would be redshifted as it traveled through the
expanding universe. The redshift would increase with increasing distance to the object.
In 1929 Edwin Hubble, working at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California,
measured the redshifts of a number of distant galaxies. He also measured their relative distances by
measuring the apparent brightness of a class of variable stars called Cepheids in each galaxy. When
he plotted redshift against relative distance, he found that the redshift of distant galaxies increased as
a linear function of their distance. The only explanation for this observation is that the universe was
expanding.
Once scientists understood that the universe was expanding, they immediately realized that it
would have been smaller in the past. At some point in the past, the entire universe would have been a
single point. This point, later called the big bang, was the beginning of the universe as we understand
it today.
The expanding universe is finite in both time and space. The reason that the universe did not
collapse, as Newton's and Einstein's equations said it might, is that it had been expanding from the
moment of its creation. The universe is in a constant state of change. The expanding universe, a new
idea based on modern physics, laid to rest the paradoxes that troubled astronomers from ancient
times until the early 20th Century.

Properties of the Expanding Universe

The equations of the expanding universe have three possible solutions, each of which predicts a
different eventual fate for the universe as a whole. Which fate will ultimately befall the universe can be
determined by measuring how fast the universe expands relative to how much matter the universe
contains.

The three possible types of expanding universes are called open, flat, and closed universes. If the
universe were open, it would expand forever. If the universe were flat, it would also expand forever,
but the expansion rate would slow to zero after an infinite amount of time. If the universe were closed,
it would eventually stop expanding and recollapse on itself, possibly leading to another big bang. In all
three cases, the expansion slows, and the force that causes the slowing is gravity.

A simple analogy to understand these three types of universes is to consider a spaceship launched
from the surface of the Earth. If the spaceship does not have enough speed to escape the Earth's
gravity, it will eventually fall back to Earth. This is analogous with a closed universe that recollapses. If
the spaceship is given enough speed so that it has just enough energy to escape, then at an infinite
distance away from the Earth, it will come to a stop (this is the flat universe). And lastly, if the ship is
launched with more than enough energy to escape, it will always have some speed, even when it is an
infinite distance away (the open universe).

Sources: http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/astro/universe/universe.asp; http://www.space.com/25126-

big-bang-theory.html; http://www.space.com/17777-what-is-earth-made-of.html;
http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-powered-the-big-bang/