Contemplating the Universe...

Astrophysicists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland announced yesterday that data from the WMAP Satellite launched in 2003 supports the decades old “Big Bang Theory” of the origin of the Universe. The new information based on the study of background radiation glare indicates that the Universe is vastly larger than previously thought.
Other significant findings:
1. The study supports the theory of "inflation", that is that the Universe expanded outward at a rate faster than the speed of light.
2. “Normal matter” the kind of stuff humans can sense with their eyes like Planets, Stars, comets, each other etc. makes up only about 4 % of the combined matter and energy of the universe. The rest is made up of “dark matter”, invisible and exotic physical particles and “dark energy”, a gravity defying force behind the continuing expansion of the universe.
3. Stars first appeared 400 million years after the Universe’s origin.
4. At the moment of origin the whole process started from something the size of a “marble”.
I would be totally lost at this point except for the fact that my son as a seventh grader explained to me that my thinking was limited to what I could physically sense with regard to density and that the space between molecules, atoms and particles was a lot larger or smaller than one would normally contemplate.
I’m the only person I’m acquainted with who both bought Steven Hawking's Book “A Brief History of Time” and actually read it from cover to cover.
Even so would someone please explain to me…Where did that “marble” come from?