For reasons we’re still trying to understand, the expansion of the universe suddenly went into very high gear, with the region that would someday become our entire observable universe increasing in size by a factor of more than 100 trillion trillion (i.e., 1026). Of course, that only brought it up to about the size of a beach ball, but given that the starting point was unimaginable tininess smaller than any known particle, and the growth happened over the course of something like 10-34 seconds, we have reason to be impressed.
