Home > Anniversary, Ephemeris Program > Ephemeris: 02/12/2024 – Darwin Day

Ephemeris: 02/12/2024 – Darwin Day

February 12, 2024

This is Bob Moler with Ephemeris for Darwin Day, Monday, February 12th. Today the Sun will be up for 10 hours and 18 minutes, setting at 6:06, and it will rise tomorrow at 7:46. The Moon, 3 days past new, will set at 9:53 this evening.

Today we commemorate the birthday of Charles Darwin, whose Origins of the Species produced a revolution in biology, that is the Theory of Evolution. Back then, in the 19th century, the Earth was thought to be fairly young. By then geologists had figured out that the Earth was at least millions of years old. Astronomers working on the amount of energy that the Sun put out calculated that if it were made of coal it would burn out in about 3000 years. So there was a definite problem with the age of the Sun and the Earth. With the discovery of radioactivity and the beginnings of Quantum Theory, at the turn of the last century, astronomers and physicists figured out that the conversion of matter into energy, according to Einstein, was energetic enough to fuel the Sun for billions of years. Enough time for evolution to work. In fact the entire universe is evolving!

The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EST, UT –5 hours). They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Biology isn’t my thing… too messy. Astronomy is mainly physics and chemistry, with the addition, relatively recently of astrobiology. However, not only living things evolve, the universe itself has been evolving for the last 13.8 billion years from the origin of the Big Bang to the present day.

An infographic of the evolution and expansion of the universe
This is an infographic of the evolution and expansion of the universe from the Big Bang to the present day showing the inflationary period when it increased in size extremely rapidly, faster than the speed of light, actually. About 380,000 years later light was finally decoupled from matter. Before then the universe was opaque. Light could not travel very far before hitting another particle. At 380,000 years the universe became cool enough so that electrons and protons in this Big Bang soup could find each other and become atoms. This caused the universe to become transparent. At that point is where we see, with our radio telescopes, the cosmic microwave background radiation. After that there’s a period where stars are being formed. There’s not much light being emitted because the stars are not radiating brightly because the hydrogen fusion in their cores had not started. This period is called the dark ages and may have lasted up to 400 million years. The period of the first stars and galaxies is the area that James Webb Space Telescope was primarily built to investigate. It is only visible in the infrared. All this happened 9 billion years before the Earth was formed. It is evolution on a scale Darwin could not have imagined! Click or tap on the image to enlarge it. Credit: NASA.
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