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Posts Tagged ‘Big Bang’

Ephemeris: 02/12/2024 – Darwin Day

February 12, 2024 Comments off

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.
Categories: Anniversary, Ephemeris Program Tags: , ,

Ephemeris: 07/25/2023 – Is the universe twice as old as we think?

July 25, 2023 Comments off

This is Ephemeris for Tuesday, July 25th. Today the Sun will be up for 14 hours and 55 minutes, setting at 9:16, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:22. The Moon, at first quarter today, will set at 12:44 tomorrow morning.

Is the universe twice as old as we thought? That’s a conclusion of a study printed in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa, in which he postulates that the structure and chemical composition of very early galaxies found by the James Webb Space Telescope turn out to be more developed than one would expect for objects so soon after The Big Bang. The problem with hypothesizing an older universe is to explain what we see currently that have shown that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. One of the things he hypothesized was something called tired light, where light loses energy and is red-shifted not just because of the expansion of the universe but over time and distance. Stay tuned.

The astronomical event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (EDT, UT –4 hours). They may be different for your location.

Addendum

Expansion of the universe
NASA/WMAP Science Team – Original version: NASA; modified by Cherkash
Timeline of the universe. A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years. The far left depicts the earliest moment we can now probe, when a period of “inflation” produced a burst of exponential growth in the universe. (Size is depicted by the vertical extent of the grid in this graphic.) For the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity. More recently, the expansion has begun to speed up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to dominate the expansion of the universe. The afterglow light seen by WMAP was emitted about 375,000 years after inflation and has traversed the universe largely unimpeded since then. The conditions of earlier times are imprinted on this light; it also forms a backlight for later developments of the universe. Public Domain.

Diagram is from Wikipedia. Above is the expansion of the universe as commonly understood. Not mentioned in the program script above, is the requirement, according to Gupta’s hypothesis, that the basic constants of the universe change over time. As Carl Sagan explained, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” So more evidence is needed. His hypothesis won’t be the only explanation put forth, so there will be more to test. That’s job security for astrophysicists and cosmologists.

Categories: Concepts, Ephemeris Program Tags: , , ,