To The Stars : The Universe

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It is 13.7 billion years old, 45 billion light years across and filled with 100 billion galaxies - each containing hundreds of billions of stars - the Universe as revealed by modern science is dazzling in beauty. But, paradoxically, as our knowledge of the Universe has expanded, so the division between us and the cosmos has melted away. The Universe may turn out to be infinite in extent and full of alien worlds beyond imagination, but current scientific thinking suggests that we need it all in order to exist. Without the stars, there would be no ingredients to build us.

 

The story of the Universe is therefore our story; tracing our origins back beyond the dawn of man, beyond the origin of life on Earth, and even beyond the formation of Earth itself; back to events - perhaps inevitable, perhaps chance ones - that occurred less than a billionth of a second after the Universe began.

 

On Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8 passed into the darkness behind the Moon, and Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders became the first humans in history to lose sight of Earth. When they emerged from the Lunar shadow, they saw a crescent Earth rising against the blackness of space and chose to broadcast a creation story to the people of their home planet. We still don't know how the Universe began, but we do have very strong evidence that something interesting happened 13.75 billion years ago that can be interpreted as the beginning of our universe. We call it the Big Bang.

 

All the ingredients required to build the hundreds of billions of galaxies and thousands of trillions of suns were once contained in a volume far smaller than a single atom. Unimaginably dense and hot beyond comprehension, this tiny seed has been expanding and cooling for the last 13.75 billion years, which has been sufficient time for the laws of nature to assemble all the complexity and beauty we observe in the night skies. These natural processes have also given rise to Earth, its life. The Planck epoch - the time period before a million million million million million million millionths of a second after the Big Bang, is currently beyond our understanding. This is because we lack a theory of space and time before this point, and consequently have very little to say about it. Such a theory, known as quantum gravity, is the holy grail of modern theoretical physics and is being energetically searched for by hundreds of scientists across the world. In one theory, what we see as the Big Bang and the beginning of the Universe was caused by the collision of two pieces of space and time, known as 'branes ', that had been floating forever in an infinite, pre-existing space.

 

The black holes, colliding galaxies and stars at the edge of time are fascinating, and we see them all, but to characterize the ancient science of astronomy as a spectator sport would be to miss the point. The wonders we see through our telescopes are laboratories where we can test our understanding of the natural world in conditions so extreme that we will never be able to recreate them here on Earth.

 

Armed with a greater knowledge and understanding of our universe, and also with new technology and modern approaches to science, we can discover wonders of the Universe that would have remained hidden to us centuries ago. Galaxies such as the spiral[1]shaped Dwingeloo 1 have recently been found hidden behind the Milky Way.

 

Bibliography:

 

 

Bars, Itzhak; Terning, John (November 2009). Extra Dimensions in Space and Time. Springer. pp. 27–. ISBN 978-0-387-77637-8. Retrieved May , 2011.

^ Davies, Paul (2006). The Goldilocks Enigma. First Mariner Books. p. 43ff. ISBN 978-0-618-59226-5.

Fixsen, D.J. (2009). "The Temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background". The Astrophysical Journal. 707 (2): 916–20. arXiv:0911.1955. Bibcode:2009ApJ...707..916F. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/707/2/916. S2CID 119217397.

^  "First Planck results: the universe is still weird and interesting". Matthew Francis. Ars technica. March 21, 2013. Retrieved August 21, 2015.

^ NASA/WMAP Science Team (January 24, 2014). "Universe 101: Will the Universe expand forever?". NASA. Retrieved April 16, 2015.

^  Zeilik, Michael; Gregory, Stephen A. (1998). Introductory Astronomy & Astrophysics (4th ed.). Saunders College Publishing. ISBN 978-0-03-006228-5. The totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be.

^ Siegel, Ethan (July 14, 2018). "Ask Ethan: How Large Is The Entire, Unobservable Universe?". Forbes.

^ Dold-Samplonius, Yvonne (2002). From China to Paris: 2000 Years Transmission of Mathematical Ideas. Franz Steiner Verlag.

^  d Glick, Thomas F.; Livesey, Steven; Wallis, Faith. Medieval Science Technology and Medicine: An Encyclopedia. Routledge.

^ Carroll, Bradley W.; Ostlie, Dale A. (July 23, 2013). An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics (International ed.). Pearson. pp. 1173–74. ISBN 978-1-292-02293-2.

^  Hawking, Stephen (1988). A Brief History of Time. Bantam Books. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-553-05340-1.

 

 Marov, Mikhail Ya. (2015). "The Structure of the Universe". The Fundamentals of Modern Astrophysics. pp. 279–294. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-8730-2_10. ISBN 978-1-4614-8729-6.

^ Mackie, Glen (February 1, 2002). "To see the Universe in a Grain of Taranaki Sand". Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. Retrieved January 28, 2017.

^ "Unveiling the Secret of a Virgo Dwarf Galaxy". European Southern Observatory Press Release. ESO: 12. May 3, 2000. Bibcode:2000eso..pres...12. Retrieved January 3, 2007.

^ "Hubble's Largest Galaxy Portrait Offers a New High-Definition View". NASA. February 28, 2006. Retrieved January 3, 2007.

^ Gibney, Elizabeth (September 3, 2014). "Earth's new address: 'Solar System, Milky Way, Laniakea'". Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15819. S2CID 124323774. Retrieved August 21, 2015.

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