- 1697 - The story beginning to end. What happened over the past 13.7 billion years. How did we get to where we are today? 95% of it we do not know. How fun is that?
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--------------------------- 1697 - The story beginning to end.
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- This all happened 13,700,000,000 years ago. In case you missed it. It was the birth of time and the beginning of the expansion of space. In a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second ( 10^-34 seconds) space expanded faster than the speed of light. The Universe doubled in size 90 times. The Universe started as a single “point” then when at 10^-34 seconds of age it instantaneously grew to the size of a golf ball.
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- When this hot , dense, point reached the size of a golf ball it had already cooled off and slowed down its rate of expansion. It kept expanding and cooling until charged particles could begin collecting into neutral particles. One second after the expansion slowed neutron, protons, electrons, positrons, photons, and neutrinos filled the Universe. Electrons and protons began to form neutral hydrogen.
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- After 3 minutes the temperature had cooled from 10^32 degrees Kelvin to 10^9 degrees Kelvin. This was cool enough for the isotope of Deuterium to form ( a proton plus a neutron). Deuterium combined to form helium ( 2 protons and 2 neutrons), and some Lithium ( 3 protons )
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- The Universe was too hot and too charged up with particles for the photons of light to escape because they were continuously scattered in all directions. This plasma continued to cool and expand. After 380,000 years it had cooled enough for enough charges to become neutralized that photons began to escape. The Universe began to shine for the first time. Before that it was a fog of dense plasma that scattered the light so intensely the photons remained contained.
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- Today we see this “first shine” as the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB). The temperature had cooled to now 3,000 degrees Kelvin, cool enough to allow the Universe to become transparent emitting Gamma Rays. The high energy Gamma Rays lost energy and became stretched as they traveled through space that was expanding over the next 13 billion years. Today they are microwave radiation (CMB). This radiation is like a white noise coming from all directions. If you remember the old CRT televisions and that static white noise you saw between switching channels, that was the CMB.
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- This event was a flash of Gamma Rays but it was not starlight because no stars had yet formed. It took another 400,000,000 years for clumps of hydrogen and helium gas to collect and gravitationally collapse to form the first stars.
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- The Universe expansion continued for the next 5 billion years. The gravitational forces were dominate and the expansion was gradually slowing down. But, it was also getting less and less dense as the masses spread further and further apart. The dominance of gravity was overcome and the dominance of anti-gravity took over. We call this anti-gravity energy , “Dark Energy”. Today it is accelerating the expansion of the Universe at an ever increasing rate. We do not know what it is or what causes it. It is the biggest mystery in science today. Literally big, it is 72% of all the energy-mass in the Universe.
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- Today it is expanding at 47,000 miles per hour for every million lightyears of space. It is 9 billion years after it first started when our Solar System formed. Today our Solar System s 4.6 billion years old and the Universe is 13.7 billion years old.
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- This scenario that started in the beginning can be thought of as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the Universe. It did not start as a single point in the center with expansion moving outward like a supernova explosion. Rather space everywhere began stretching out and carrying matter along with it.
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- When the Universe first formed matter and energy were distrusted evenly, uniformly throughout space. Somehow small fluctuations in the density of matter allowed gravity to create a vast web-like structure of stars separated in space. The denser regions created more intense gravity and formed the stars that formed the galaxies. There were clusters of galaxies interconnected by filaments of stars. The Universe was a series of great walls of galaxies separated by great voids of empty space.
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- Astronomers have tried to piece all this together assuming the Universe was entirely made of ordinary matter (baryonic matter). But, the math did not work out. It order to match observations the ratios of matter and energy needed to explain the Universe expansion just described, the ordinary matter and it attraction with gravity could only occupy 4.6% of the total mass-energy in the Universe. Somehow there is 23% more matter, called Dark Matter, that we can not see. And, somehow there is 72% anti-gravity forces, called Dark Energy, that is causing the Universe to be expanding at an every increasing rate.
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- The rate of expansion is known as Hubble’s Constant, Ho. It is currently:
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--------------------- Ho = 47,000 miles per hour per million lightyears.
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- Ho is “constant” at this point in time. It says that for every million lightyears distance of space separating two galaxies they are receding away from each other at 47,000 miles per hour.
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----------------- Receding Velocity = Distance * Ho
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-------------- The velocity is the speed of light. And the inverse of Ho is the age of the Universe.
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------------------- 1 / Ho = million lightyears distance / 47,000 miles per hour.
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- A lightyear is 5,880,000 million miles
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- There are 8,760 hours in a year.
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------------------- 1 / Ho = 10^6 * 5.88 * 10^12 miles / 47,000 miles * 8.76 *10^3 hours / year.
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- Age of the Universe is 14.7 billion years. This is the calculation if Ho is an average velocity and constant throughout time. It was not. The age is calculated to be 13.7 billion years because in the beginning 5 billion years the expansion was slowing down and in the past 5 billion years the expansion is speeding up at an ever accelerating rate. The math gets more complicated. There is more to learn, stay tuned.
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