Why bother with astronomy? (Part 2)

The world view we have today is astonishing, we see how little we
know, as the universe is said to be made up of stuff, most of which we
cannot see or detect directly. This stuff is all over the universe and
makes up the bulk of it, 84%. That just leaves us with 24% of stuff
that we see and can study
thoroughly. The same stuff that stars billions of light years away are
made of, is the same stuff that you and everything you can see around
you is made of, we call it (rather unromantically) visible matter, and
the other stuff: Dark Matter.
There is something else, perhaps even more weird than the dark stuff.
Though not related to dark matter it is called dark energy. And no, it
is not a force of evil (at least we think it isn't), just a force that
acts
against gravity, and by the looks of it, it looks like its winning as
it is accelerating the expansion of the universe set off by the big
bang some 14 billion years ago. This is as weird as throwing a ball in
the air, expecting it to fall back down as it reaches its maximum
height it instead accelerates upward. That shouldn't happen, right?
Well this is the perfect
analogy given by the astrophysicist, Katie Mack, on her blog.
If history is anything to go by, this world view will also not last
forever, we will find out what this stuff and energy really is, perhaps
discover new physical laws and get ever closer to the truth of where
we come from and where we might end up.

For now we rest easy know the edge of the world is the stuff of
legend...or is it?

Why bother with astronomy?

Astronomy has too broad a definition to put in one line. But basically it is the study of the universe as a whole.
Yes but, what is the universe?
Let me give a very short history lesson so simple and quick that the reader will not get bored too quickly. About 14 billion years ago…okay, maybe that's too far back, more on that later. The view of the world has undoubtedly changed so many times that this subject alone is worth quite the mention. The ancients had simple world views very much connected to each culture's creation story. There's far too many to mention but before mentioning one that a lot of us are familiar with in general history, I find great intrigue in how the Sumerians saw the world.
The Sumerian creation story also takes into account the occurrence of all the continents on one face of the earth. It starts off with two bodies in the solar system; two planets violently crashing into each other. The remnants of the two planets thus created the huge oceanic floor that occupies one side of the earth and the continents on the other side that survived the impact of the crash and the remaining debris is how the moon came to be. Amazingly, this fact about the moon is a recent discovery in conventional astronomy. What's amazing about this story is the time in which it was documented; thousands of years before the planets were found to be other worlds, and worlds orbiting the sun for that matter.
One cannot look down upon the world view of the ancients as one is not surprised at the number of individuals who, today still, have remnants of it embedded in their notion of the world we live in. We know today that the sun does not come up or set, yet this notion still has a strong footing in the English language. We know today that the universe is not perfect the way we thought it was: a series of concentric spheres in which the earth is at the center (geocentric). We know today that the earth is not flat and many other things that seem obvious to our generation that were not so obvious to our ancestors a mere century ago.
Many of the scientific and paradigm advances of mankind dawn from individuals who looked further than the accepted world views of their time and thus pushed ever further the limits of the universe, and so the limits of our psyche, our imagination. The irony is that, for some, what pushed them was the desire to prove the then current world views, and you can imagine just how hazy the results drove them.
Through true dedication and hard work they worked at finding out the truth and in this way, the sun upgraded from a mere orb in the celestial sphere (geocentric view) to being at the center of the universe itself (heliocentric view) to it being just another sun in a myriad of hundreds of billions in our Milky way galaxy in which further observation showed billions of other 'island universes', galaxies that make the fabric of the large scale universe, a cosmic web so beautiful and intricate, its perfect.
This is the universe.
So perfect is the cosmos that it is amazing how the ancients set out to find this perfection: the spheres of geocentrism, the perfectly circular orbits of the planets (Latin for wanderers) and the Euclidian geometry Kepler sought in the pattern of the distances of the planets from the sun.
Plato thought that God made the universe to be perfect, and perfection to Plato must have been the dimensions of a sphere. We cannot, still, brush off these world views as incorrect as we must remember how long they lasted, with geocentrism having lasted over 1200 years, we know that no world view will last as long as this again. We must never forget that we will never know everything but at the same time we must not take this as a deterrent but as motivation to study further. Who knows how many more secrets the universe holds?

(I'm sleepingly blogging this from my not-so-smart-but-reliable mobile and have too much to say for its little cpu to handle, so my blog continues immediately)

Stay hungry, stay curious.

A (very) Brief History of the Universe

One of the pleasures of looking at the stars at night is trying to figure out what all the stuff out there really is and how it came to be.

Some of the stuff you will see includes giant gas clouds where stars are born, and like everything that is born, death is inevitable.
The death of stars is nothing short of dramatic; they can explode in a supernova (a really really huge explosion) and colapse into a black-hole (not just the stuff of science fiction), leave a neutron star nuke behind (really exotic stuff), turn into a white dwarf (some really dense objects) or recycle the material to fashion a new richer solar system.

So, through many ambitious and exotic theories and many a rigorous observations, we think we know how the universe came to be. So, I will try to give a very rough account of the creation story.

Once upon a time...-let me re-phrase that- as time and space (well, space-time if you want to be all fancy and accurate) did not exist, as a matter of fact nothing did, zilch, not even a void or anything, just absolute nothing!
At this beginning, the universe and everything in it was squeezed into one very small point. Now, I have to mince my words as the word 'small' cannot apply where space does not yet exist.

All of a sudden (Chuck Norris must have sneezed if you as me), this point expanded explosively into the nothingness, superhot (and superfast) in every untouched direction.
So hot was the universe then that any sort of normal matter could not have existed until the universe was cool enough to allow this. I like to think of it as one trying to build a house of cards during a 8.5 magnitude earth-quake (figure is purely arbitiary).

The next almost emmidiate stage (inflation) of this hot universe caused the occurrence of some familiar (and anti-familiar) basic particles that flew around everywhere forming stuff we call plasma (a very hot gas).
The universe was then like a huge cloud that looked the same in every direction and as soon as the electrons were slow enough to marry themselves to protons by the powers vested in the electro-magnetic force, atoms specifically the hydrogen atom (one electron - one proton) were born.

The fog slowly cleared as, still expanding, the universe cooled enough to allow the conglamoration of cloud-like structure made entirely of gas that we fancy calling giant molecular clouds. And out of these giant clouds came about conglamorarions of stars that formed galaxies, which (each with billions of stars) are the building blogs of the universe today.

Out of one of these galaxies was one James Dean of a supermassive star that quickly used up its hydrogen fuel and thus succuming to its gravity (gravity won over the heat-pressure).
It collapsed in a supernova that ejected tons of new comples material that was cooked in the star during its lifetime.

The cloud of dust that was left behind had enough hydrogen to create another star at its centre and the rest of the material swirled around it.
The swirling cloud became a myriad of bodies; planets that counted innto the twenties, some rocky , some gassy, crashing into each other until eight survived (nine, for all those Pluto-philes out there).
One of the rocky survivors third from the sun started having life on its surface, single celled organisms that eventually became multi-cellular. One of these cosmic new-comers became smart enough to look up and around and wonder what all this stuff is made of and how it came to be.

Fast-forward to the present and the smartest of these bipedal beings started reading this column and thoroughly enjoyed it to the very end!
To get all philosophical on you, let's imagine a thought experiment that features the whole 13.7 billion years of the universe's history on a typical 12 month calendar, where the big bang is on January 1midnight and the present is on December 31 just before midnight.

Among other timescales, the appearance of humans (civilization to be exact) is only 0.16 of a second before midnight.
On that note, it's safe to say we haven't been around a very long time and I cannot help but question our self-proclaimed superiority in the universe.

I'll leave it to the rockstar of a reader to decide. I hope the inquisitive reader will read up more on this very interesting topic.

Stay hungry, stay curious.