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June 6, 2017 - January 13, 2018
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
The world has persisted many a long year, having once been set going in the appropriate motions. From these everything else follows. LUCRETIUS, C. 50 BC
Conditions were so hot, the basic forces of nature that collectively describe the universe were unified. Though still unknown how it came into existence, this sub-pinpoint-size cosmos could only expand. Rapidly. In what today we call the big bang.
The German physicist Max Planck, after whom these unimaginably small quantities are named, introduced the idea of quantized energy in 1900 and is generally credited as the father of quantum mechanics.
Astrophysicists apply the tenets and tools of general relativity and quantum mechanics to very different classes of problems.
For the first billion years, the universe continued to expand and cool as matter gravitated into the massive concentrations we call galaxies.
Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a superintelligent alien species?
Nebulium was simply the signature of ordinary oxygen doing extraordinary things.
The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them.
After the big bang, the main agenda of the cosmos was expansion,
The simple discovery of the cosmic microwave background turned cosmology into something more than mythology.
Our own spiral-shaped galaxy, the Milky Way, is named for its spilled-milk appearance to the unaided eye across Earth’s nighttime sky.
The nearest galaxy larger than our own is two million light-years away, beyond the stars that trace the constellation Andromeda.
each system lacks reference to the existence of stars: Milky Way, Magellanic Clouds, Andromeda Nebula.
The galaxies are faint not only because they are distant but because the population of luminous stars within them was thin.
Yes, intergalactic space is, and will forever be, where the action is.
we now call these mysterious zones “dark matter haloes.”
From this we conclude that most of the dark matter—hence, most of the mass in the universe—does not participate in nuclear fusion, which disqualifies it as “ordinary” matter, whose essence lies in a willingness to participate in the atomic and nuclear forces that shape matter as we know it.
If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the matter, and it’s the gravity we don’t understand.
In the Sun-based “heliocentric” universe, conceived by the sixteenth-century mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus, planets orbited in circles.
In other words, concentrations of mass cause distortions—dimples, really—in the fabric of space and time.
“Matter tells space how to curve; space tells matter how to move.”
in 1929, the American astrophysicist Edwin P. Hubble discovered that the universe is not static.
the more distant a galaxy, the faster the galaxy recedes from the Milky Way.
in 1998, science exhumed lambda one last time.
The shape of our four-dimensional universe comes from the relationship between the amount of matter and energy that lives in the cosmos and the rate at which the cosmos is expanding.
Only three of the naturally occurring elements were manufactured in the big bang. The rest were forged in the high-temperature hearts and explosive remains of dying stars, enabling subsequent generations of star systems to incorporate this enrichment, forming planets and, in our case, people.
Both oxygen and carbon are major ingredients of life as we know it.
sodium is the most common glowing gas in municipal street lamps across the nation.
although they may all soon be replaced by LEDs, which are even brighter at a given wattage, and cheaper.
Titanium is 1.7 times denser than aluminum, but it’s more than twice as strong.
Stars, however, are in the business of making energy. As high-mass stars manufacture and accumulate iron in their cores, they are nearing death. Without a fertile source of energy, the star collapses under its own weight and instantly rebounds in a stupendous supernova explosion, outshining a billion suns for more than a week.
Along with osmium and platinum, iridium is one of the three heaviest (densest) elements on the Table—
Iridium is rare on Earth’s surface but relatively common in six-mile metallic asteroids, which, upon colliding with Earth, vaporize on impact, scattering their atoms across Earth’s surface. So, whatever might have been your favorite theory for offing the dinosaurs, a killer asteroid the size of Mount Everest from outer space should be at the top of your list.
Ceres and Pallas were not planets; they are asteroids, and they live in the asteroid belt, now known to contain hundreds of thousands of objects—somewhat more than the number of elements in the Periodic Table.
The first atomic bomb ever used in warfare had uranium as its active ingredient, and was dropped by the United States, incinerating the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
Using freshman-level calculus you can show that the one and only shape that has the smallest surface area for an enclosed volume is a perfect sphere.
