[Grammar] the matter ... continues to race away from the area where the Big Bang had occurred.

[armruseng]

At the same time, the matter inside the galaxies continues to race away from the area where the Big Bang had occurred.

Can anyone please explain the reason for using Past Perfect in this sentence. Would it be OK to use Past Simple instead?

In school they taught us that Past Perfect is also called the "pre-past" tense, which means that we use Past Perfect when we want to reflect that the event happened before another event in the past (expressed by the Past Simple). In the sentence in question I don't see a clear reference to a certain event in the past, hence no need to use a "pre-past" tense to refer to an even earlier event.

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

With just that line to read, I agree that had doesn't belong there.

But it might make sense in the broader context of the article. That's why we ask you to tell us where you got your quotes.

Can you give us the more of the paragraph and its source?

 

[whatever]

Can you give us the more of the paragraph and its source?

It's me again. Sorry for the delay. Had to register another account, because the previous one got some password problems.

This is a text from an English textbook published in a non-English speaking country.

Here's the full text:

Big Bang


The Big Bang Model is a broadly accepted scientific theory for the origin and evolution of our universe. According to this theory, the universe was created about 15 billion years ago from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter in all directions.
Astronomers believe that once all the matter and energy in the universe were concentrated in a single place. This place was extremely hot and dense. Then, sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago, an enormous and powerful explosion – the Big Bang – shot the concentrated matter and energy in all directions. After the initial Big Bang, the force of gravity began to affect the matter racing outward in every direction. Gravity caused some of the matter to come together to form galaxies and stars. The clumps of matter around our own star, the Sun, became planets. Some planets were large enough and had enough gravity to attract matter that became moons or satellites.
In 1927, the Belgian priest George Lemaître was the first to assume that the universe began with the explosion of a primeval atom. Years later, Edwin Hubble found experimental evidence that helped to justify Lemaître's theory. He made observations, and stated that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us in every direction at a speed proportional to their distance from the centre of the universe.
Since the Big Bang, the universe has been continuously expanding, and, thus, the distance between clusters of galaxies has become much bigger than it was before. This phenomenon is known as 'the red shift'. The stars and galaxies were much closer to each other in the past than they are at present. At the same time, the matter inside the galaxies continues to race away from the area where the Big Bang had occurred.
The Big Bang theory also predicts the existence of cosmic background radiation (the glow left after the explosion itself). In 1964, this radiation was discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who later won the Nobel Prize for this discovery.
Although the Big Bang theory has been widely accepted, it will probably never be proved. Thus it leaves a number of tough, unanswered questions.

 

[probus]

Hello, Whatever, and again, welcome to the forum. In reposting your thread you have omitted your question, but I believe it was whether the past perfect "had occurred" was the best tense to use there. In my opinion, there is a problem with tenses, but that's not it. The author was using a perfect tense: this and that has happened or has been happening. Then they abruptly switched to the simple present: matter continues to fly apart. Had they carried on as they began (matter has been continuing to race away ...)
the past perfect tense (had occurred) would be fine.