Friday, October 9, 2020

UNIVERSE - creation in seven “days“?

 -  2856  -  UNIVERSE  -  creation in seven “days“?   The broadly accepted theory for the origin and evolution of our universe is the Big Bang model, which states that the universe began as an incredibly hot, dense point roughly 13.7 billion years ago.  How did the universe go from being fractions of an inch  across to what it is today?

 


---------------------------  2856  -  UNIVERSE  -  creation in seven “days“?    

-  It took quite a bit more than seven “days” to create the universe as we know it today.  But, that depends how the bible defines what a “day’ is?  What if a “day” stood for 1 billion years instead 1/360 th of a year?

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- This “day” began with a  Big Bang.  It was not an explosion in space. It was the appearance of space everywhere in the universe.  According to this Big Bang theory, the universe was born as a very hot, very dense, single point in space.

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-   From observations of the “cosmic microwave background‘, which contains the afterglow of light and radiation left over from the Big Bang, we have clues as to how it all began. This background radiation pervades the universe and is visible to microwave detectors, which allows scientists to piece together clues of the early universe.

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-  In 2001, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) began studying the conditions as they existed in the early universe by measuring radiation from the cosmic microwave background. WMAP was able to determine the age of the universe to be 13.7 billion years old.

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-  When the universe was very young, like a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, it underwent an incredible growth spurt. During this burst of expansion, which is known as “inflation“, the universe grew exponentially and doubled in size at least 90 times.  2^90 is a very large number!

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-  The universe was expanding, and as it expanded, it got cooler and less dense.  After inflation, the universe continued to grow, but at a slower rate. As space expanded, the universe continued to cool and matter formed.

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-  Light chemical elements were created within the first three minutes of the universe's formation. As the universe expanded, temperatures cooled and protons and neutrons collided to make deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen. Much of this deuterium combined to make helium.  Hydrogen and helium were the expanding gas in the early universe

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-  For the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, however, the intense heat from the universe's creation made it essentially too hot for light to shine. Atoms crashed together with enough force to break up into a dense, opaque plasma of protons, neutrons and electrons that scattered light like fog.  These are the three elements of the first neutral atom.

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-  About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, matter cooled enough for electrons to combine with nuclei to form these neutral atoms. This phase is known as "recombination," and the absorption of free electrons caused the universe to become transparent. The light that was unleashed at this time is detectable today in the form of radiation from the cosmic microwave background.

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-  The era of recombination was followed by a period of darkness before stars and other bright objects were formed. Roughly 400 million years after the Big Bang, the universe began to come out of its dark ages. This period in the universe's evolution is called the age of “re-ionization“.

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-  This dynamic phase was thought to have lasted more than a 500 million years, but based on new observations, scientists think re-ionization may have occurred more rapidly than previously thought. 

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-  During this time, clumps of gas collapsed enough to form the very first stars and galaxies. The emitted ultraviolet light from these energetic events cleared out and destroyed most of the surrounding neutral hydrogen gas. 

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-  The process of re-ionization, plus the clearing of foggy hydrogen gas, caused the universe to become transparent to ultraviolet light for the first time.

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-  Astronomers comb the universe looking for the most far-flung and oldest galaxies to help them understand the properties of this early universe. Similarly, by studying the cosmic microwave background, astronomers can work backwards to piece together the events that came before. 

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-  Data from missions like WMAP and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), which launched in 1989, and the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990, all help scientists try to solve the most enduring mysteries and answer the most debated questions in cosmology.

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-  Our solar system is estimated to have been born a little after 9 billion years after the Big Bang, making it about 4.6 billion years old. According to current estimates, the Sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone, and orbits roughly 25,000 light-years from the galactic core.

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-  The Sun and the rest of our solar system was formed from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the solar nebula. As gravity caused the nebula to collapse, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. During this phase, most of the material was pulled toward the center to form the Sun. 

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-  In the 1960s and 1970s, astronomers began thinking that there might be more mass in the universe than what is visible. Vera Rubin, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, observed the speeds of stars at various locations in galaxies.

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-  Her calculations using basic Newtonian physics should imply that stars on the outskirts of a galaxy would orbit more slowly than stars at the center, but Rubin found no difference in the velocities of stars farther out. In fact, she found that all stars in a galaxy seem to circle the center at more or less the same speed. 

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-  This meant that the galaxy was surrounded by more mass.  This mysterious and invisible mass became known as “dark matter“. Dark matter is inferred because of the gravitational pull it exerts on regular matter. 

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-  One hypothesis states the mysterious stuff could be formed by exotic particles that don't interact with light or regular matter, which is why it has been so difficult to detect.

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-  Dark matter is thought to make up 23 percent of the universe. In comparison, only 4 percent of the universe is composed of regular matter, which encompasses stars, planets and people.

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-  In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble made a revolutionary discovery about the universe. Using a newly constructed telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, Hubble observed that the universe is not static, but rather is expanding.

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-  In 1998, the space telescope named after the famous astronomer, the Hubble Space Telescope, studied very distant supernovas and found that, a long time ago, the universe was expanding more slowly than it is today. This discovery was surprising because it was long thought that the gravity of matter in the universe would slow its expansion, or even cause it to contract. 

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-  “Dark energy” became the theory to explain this.  It is thought to be the strange force that is pulling the cosmos apart at ever-increasing speeds, but it remains undetected and shrouded in mystery. The existence of this elusive energy, which is thought to make up 73 percent of the universe, is one of the most hotly debated topics in cosmology, the science to explain the universe

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-  While much has been discovered about the creation and evolution of the universe, there are enduring questions that remain unanswered. Dark matter and dark energy remain two of the biggest mysteries, but cosmologists continue to probe the universe in hopes of better understanding how it all began.

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-  It took quite a bit more than seven days to create the universe as we know it today.  A new paradigm for understanding the earliest eras in the history of the universe uses techniques from an area of modern physics called “loop quantum cosmology“.

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-  The scientists now have extended analyses that include quantum physics farther back in time than ever before, all the way to the beginning. The new paradigm of loop quantum origins shows, for the first time, that the large-scale structures we now see in the universe evolved from fundamental fluctuations in the essential quantum nature of "space-time," which existed even at the very beginning of the universe over 14 billion years ago. 

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-  This new paradigm provides a conceptual and mathematical framework for describing the exotic "quantum-mechanical geometry of space-time" in the very early universe. The paradigm shows that, during this early era, the universe was compressed to such unimaginable densities that its behavior was ruled not by the classical physics of Einstein's general theory of relativity, but by an even more fundamental theory that also incorporates the strange dynamics of quantum mechanics. 

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-  The density of matter was huge then, 10^94 grams per cubic centimeter, as compared with the density of an atomic nucleus today, which is only 10^14 grams / cc.

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-  In this bizarre quantum-mechanical environment,  one can speak only of probabilities of events rather than certainties, physical properties naturally would be vastly different from the way we experience them today.

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-   Among these differences, are the concept of "time," as well as the changing dynamics of various systems over time as they experience the “fabric of quantum geometry”. 

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-   No space observatories have been able to detect anything as long ago and far away as the very early eras of the universe described by the new paradigm. But a few observatories have come close. 

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-  Cosmic background radiation has been detected in an era when the universe was only 380,000 years old. That period of rapid expansion was called "inflation".   The universe  burst out into a much-diluted version of its earlier super-compressed self.

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-   At the beginning of inflation, the density of the universe was a trillion times less than during its infancy, so quantum factors now are much less important in ruling the large-scale dynamics of matter and geometry.

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-  Observations of the cosmic background radiation show that the universe had a predominantly uniform consistency after inflation, except for a light sprinkling of some regions that were more dense and others that were less dense. 

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-  The standard inflationary theory for describing the early universe, uses the classical-physics equations of Einstein and treats space-time as a smooth continuum.  The inflationary theory has had remarkable success in explaining the observed features of the cosmic background radiation.

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-  Yet this model is incomplete. It retains the idea that the universe burst forth from nothing in a Big Bang, which naturally results from the inability of the paradigm's general-relativity physics to describe extreme quantum-mechanical situations.  The quantum theory of gravity, like loop quantum cosmology, goes beyond Einstein in order to capture the true physics near the origin of the universe.

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-  When scientists use the inflation paradigm together with Einstein's equations to model the evolution of the seed-like areas sprinkled throughout the cosmic background radiation, they find that the irregularities serve as seeds that evolve over time into the galaxy clusters and other large-scale structures that we see in the universe today. 

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-  Amazingly, the new loop-quantum-origins paradigm with its quantum-cosmology equations, found that fundamental fluctuations in the very nature of space at the moment of the Big Bounce evolve to become the seed-like structures seen in the cosmic microwave background.

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-  The genesis of the cosmic structure of our universe from the inflationary epoch all the way to the Big Bounce, covering some 11 orders of magnitude in the density of matter and the curvature of space-time.  That is 10^11 power!

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-  Cosmic inflation explains why the universe is billions of years old, as well as why the universe is nearly flat. The theory's conclusions about how the universe should look match observations by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

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-  But is inflation the only model that can explain the beginnings of the universe? But, other possibilities would require strange physics, such as a speed of sound faster than the speed of light.

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-  Science has found only three kinds of early universe theories that can explain the distribution of matter in today's universe, assuming that the standard theory of gravity is correct and that the universe was expanding in early times.

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-  According to the physicists' calculations, viable early universe theories must incorporate either an accelerated cosmic expansion (inflation); a speed of sound faster than the speed of light; or energies so high that scientists would need to invoke a theory of quantum gravity such as string theory, which predicts the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.

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-  The theory of inflation turns out to be the only way to do it within the context of standard physics," with formulating the idea for the study.   Inflation doesn't require any exotic physics. It's just standard particle physics.

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-  Cosmic inflation accounts for the distribution of the matter in the universe by incorporating quantum field theory, which states that under "normal" circumstances, particles of matter and something called antimatter can pop into existence suddenly, before meeting and annihilating each other almost instantly.

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-  According to cosmic inflation, materializing pairs of matter and antimatter particles flew apart so quickly in the rapidly expanding early universe that they did not have time to recombine. The same principle applied to gravitons and antigravitons, which form gravity waves.

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-  These particles became the basis of all structure in the universe today, with tiny fluctuations in the matter in the universe collapsing to form stars, planets and galaxies. 

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-  Obviously we still have more to learn,  Keep studying.  Always remain in school.  

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-  October 8, 2020                                                                              2856                                                                                                                                                

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