4029 - UNIVERSE EXPANDING - how did it start?

 

-    4029  -   UNIVERSE  EXPANDING  - how did it start?   If you could somehow manage to step outside of the universe, what would it look like? Scientists have struggled with this question, taking several different measurements in order to determine the geometry of the unierse and whether or not it will come to an end.

-------------   4029  -  UNIVERSE  EXPANDING  - how did it start?

-    How do they measure the shape of the universe?

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-   According to Einstein's theory of General Relativity, space itself can be curved by mass. As a result, the density of the universe, or,  how much mass it has spread over its volume, determines its shape, as well as its future.

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-    Scientists have calculated the "critical density" of the universe. The critical density is proportional to the square of the Hubble constant, which is used in measuring the expansion rate of the universe. Comparing the critical density to the actual density can help scientists to understand the cosmos.

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-   If the actual density of the universe is less than the critical density, then there is not enough matter to stop the expansion of the universe, and it will expand forever. The resulting shape is curved like the surface of a saddle. This is known as an “open universe”.

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-    The shape of the universe depends on its density. If the density is more than the critical density, the universe is closed and curves like a sphere; if less, it will curve like a saddle. But if the actual density of the universe is equal to the critical density, as scientists think it is, then it will extend forever like a flat piece of paper.

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-    If the actual density of the universe is greater than the critical density, then it contains enough mass to eventually stop its expansion. In this case, the universe is “closed and finite”, though it has no end, and has a “spherical shape”.

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-    Once the universe stops expanding, it will begin to contract. Galaxies will stop receding and start moving closer and closer together. Eventually, the universe will undergo the opposite of the Big Bang, often called the "Big Crunch." This is known as a “closed universe”.

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-   However, if the universe contains exactly enough mass to eventually stop the expansion, the actual density of the universe will equal the “critical density”. The expansion rate will slow down gradually, over an infinite amount of time. In such a case, the universe is considered flat and infinite in size.

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-    Measurements indicate that the universe is “flat”, suggesting that it is also infinite in size. The speed of light limits us to viewing the volume of the universe visible since the Big Bang; because the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old, scientists can only see 13.8 billion light-years from Earth.

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-    While studying distant galaxies in the early 20th century, astronomer Edwin Hubble realized that they all seemed to be rushing away from the Milky Way. He announced that the universe was expanding in all directions. Since then, astronomers have relied on measurements of supernova and other objects to refine calculations of how quickly the universe is expanding.

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-   Incomprehensible as it sound, inflation poses that the universe initially expanded far faster than the speed of light and grew from a subatomic size to a golf-ball size almost instantaneously.

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-    Other instruments measure the background radiation of the universe in an effort to determine its shape. NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) measured background fluctuations in an effort to determine whether the universe is open or closed. In 2013, scientists announced that the universe was known to be flat with only a 0.4 percent margin of error.

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-    There's a hole in the story of how our universe came to be. First, the universe inflated rapidly, like a balloon. Then, everything went boom.  But how those two periods are connected has eluded physicists. Now, a new study suggests a way to link the two epochs.

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-   In the first period,  the universe grew from an almost infinitely small point to nearly an octillion (that's a 1 followed by 27 zeros) times that in size in less than a trillionth of a second. This inflation period was followed by a more gradual, but violent, period of expansion we know as the Big Bang. During the Big Bang, an incredibly hot fireball of fundamental particles, such as protons, neutrons and electrons, expanded and cooled to form the atoms, stars and galaxies we see today.

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-    The Big Bang theory, which describes cosmic inflation, remains the most widely supported explanation of how our universe began, yet scientists are still perplexed by how these wholly different periods of expansion are connected. To solve this cosmic mystery, a team of researchers at MIT and the Netherlands' Leiden University simulated the critical transition between cosmic inflation and the Big Bang, a period they call "reheating."

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-    The post-inflation reheating period sets up the conditions for the Big Bang and, in some sense, puts the 'bang' in the Big Bang.   When the universe expanded in a flash of a second during cosmic inflation, all the existing matter was spread out, leaving the universe a cold and empty place, devoid of the hot soup of particles needed to ignite the Big Bang.

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-    During the reheating period, the energy propelling inflation is believed to decay into particles.  Once those particles are produced, they bounce around and knock into each other, transferring momentum and energy.  And,  that's what thermalizes and reheats the universe to set the initial conditions for the Big Bang.

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-     Scientists think these hypothetical particles, similar in nature to the Higgs boson, created the energy field that drove cosmic inflation. Their model showed that, under the right conditions, the energy of the inflatons could be redistributed efficiently to create the diversity of particles needed to reheat the universe.

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-    The transition from the cold inflationary period to the hot period is one that should hold some key evidence as to what particles really exist at these extremely high energies.

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-    One fundamental question that plagues physicists is how gravity behaves at the extreme energies present during inflation. In Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, all matter is believed to be affected by gravity in the same way, where the strength of gravity is constant regardless of a particle's energy.

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-     However, because of the strange world of quantum mechanics, scientists think that, at very high energies, matter responds to gravity differently.   Their model tweaked how strongly the particles interacted with gravity. They discovered that the more they increased the strength of gravity, the more efficiently the inflatons transferred energy to produce the zoo of hot matter particles found during the Big Bang.

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-    Now, they need to find evidence to buttress their model somewhere in the universe.  Astronomers earliest glimpse of the universe is a bubble of radiation left over from a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

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-    Yet the CMB only hints at the state of the universe during those first critical seconds of birth. Future observations of gravitational waves will hopefully provide the final clues.

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May 28, 2023     UNIVERSE  EXPANDING  - how did it start?        4029                                                                                                                       

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4028 - UNDERGROUND LIFE - same on other planets?

 

-    4028  -  UNDERGROUND  LIFE  -  same on other planets?      Water trapped below Earth's surface for billions of years could hold keys to unlocking the secrets of extraterrestrial life.  It may be where we came from?

-------   4028   -  UNDERGROUND  LIFE  -  same on other planets?

-    Ancient water trapped deep within an Alpine mountain range harbors microbial life that might look quite like that on other planets.  In the depths of this mountain range researchers are searching for life that might look just like that on other planets.

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The Bedretto tunnel is a disused access way to a railway tunnel underneath the imposing Saint-Gotthard mountain range in the Swiss Alps. Deep within the towering mass of granite, geobiologist Cara Magnabosco collects samples of water that hasn't seen the light of day for millions of years.                                                                       

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-    In those samples, Magnabosco searches for ancient microorganisms that are quite different from those found on Earth's surface.   Unlike most of today's life, these microorganisms don't need oxygen to survive, which makes scientists believe that they might look quite like those that first emerged on our planet over 3.5 billion years ago when Earth's atmosphere had little oxygen.

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-    These inhabitants of the wet mountain darkness could teach us about life on other bodies in the solar system, like Mars or the ice-covered moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

What are the products of a planet when there is no life, like water-rock reactions, and compare that to the signatures where life is present.  We can study this underground. We can go to the point where there is no life and look at the products and then look at how these products change when there is life.

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-The changes may be barely noticeable. For example, scientists know that living organisms produce methane. But so do many geological processes. But the methane that is a byproduct of life may look different than the purely geological gas.                   -

-   It may contain different isotopes, forms of the same chemical element with a different number of neutrons in their nucleus. Scientists reason that learning to distinguish between those isotopic differences on Earth will help them develop tools and techniques to do the same elsewhere in the solar system.

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-   It's not just methane that can give out a planet's or a moon's secret. There is a whole range of chemical elements that scientists are interested in, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur,.

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-    Methane has been extremely well studied but, for example, sulfate is also really big for microbiology in these extreme environments.   But also things like nitrates and ammonia, those are all things that life on Earth uses all the time, they are the key elements of the life cycle.

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-    The water in which Magnabosco searches for the microbes may at first glance appear just like the water running from the tap or raining from the sky. But sensitive scientific instruments reveal that the liquid is, in fact, very different. Trapped miles below the planet's surface by geological faults and fractures, the ancient water is saltier and has less oxygen dissolved in it than waters far above.   Scientists can detect more hydrogen and traces of methane in these subterranean samples.

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-    The water that drips from the walls of the Bedretto tunnel is no more than 300 million years old, but elsewhere in the world such as in Canada and South Africa, deeper deposits have been found that are up to a billion years old. Microbes trapped in such waters have evolved without contact with the planet's surface for more than a quarter of the time for which life has existed on Earth.

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-    What we see in this water as it gets older is that the cell numbers are going down. The microbial population sizes are decreasing.    In this old water, the amount of living cells per milliliter can be tens of thousands times lower than what we see in the ocean.

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-    Since conditions on other bodies in the solar system are unlikely to make it easy for any lifeforms to survive, geobiologists hope that learning how life operates on the edge of survivability under Earth's crust will tell them where and how to look for its traces elsewhere.

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-      The researchers have found that those creatures dwelling in the depths are not completely different from the everyday daylight-savoring microbes, however. They are made of similar types of proteins, and their DNA is so similar to their aboveground counterparts, in fact, that scientists are quite certain the underground creatures must be distant cousins of the surface microbes.

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-     The underground residents are much more similar to those distant ancestors than the much busier life forms on the planet's surface. While the world underground has barely changed for billions of years, allowing the microbes to relax into a predictable existence, conditions on the surface have shifted many times, forcing organisms to adapt and evolve.

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-    The conditions and the reactions that are taking place there and driving the organisms living there are relatively consistent over really long time scales, which is a lot different than the surface of our planet where we have seen huge changes in concentrations of oxygen over the billions of years but also changes in ocean chemistry and the nutrient supply on the surface.

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-    Microbial life may indeed be waiting to be discovered elsewhere in the solar system. In the meantime, it turns out we have also had some very alien neighbors right under our noses this whole time.

 

May 23, 2023               Underground Life                           4028                                                                                                                       

--------  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---

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--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews

---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Sunday, May 28, 2023  ---------------------------------

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JAMES WEBB - telescope discoveries May, 2023

 

-    4027  -  JAMES WEBB  -  telescope discoveries May, 2023?   James Webb telescope just discovered the impossible'.  These giant baby galaxies are shaking up our understanding of the early universe.

-------   4027   -  JAMES WEBB  -  telescope discoveries May, 2023

-    It is July 2022, barely a week after those first images from the revolutionary super telescope were released. Twenty-five years in the making, a hundred to a thousand times more powerful than any previous telescope, one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific experiments in human history.

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-   The telescope took decades to build, because it had to be made foldable to fit on top of a rocket and be sent into the coldness of space, 1.5 million kms from Earth. Here, far from the heat glow of the Earth, JWST can detect the faintest infrared light from the distant universe.

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-    Among the pictures is a small red dot that will shake up our understanding of how the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang. After months of analysis discovering new types of galaxies. Galaxies that the venerable Hubble Space Telescope had missed, even after decades of surveying the sky.

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-    "UFOs," the new galaxies, "ultra-red flattened objects", because they all look like flying saucers. In the color images they appear very red because all the light is coming out in the infrared, while the galaxies are invisible at wavelengths humans can see.

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-    Infrared is JWST's superpower, allowing it to spy the most distant galaxies. Ultraviolet and visible light from the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang is stretched out by the expansion of the universe as it travels towards us, so by the time the light reaches us we see it as infrared light.

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-    Massive galaxies, seen 500–800 million years after the Big Bang.    Impossibly early, impossibly massive galaxies.    Galaxies look like saucers, except one, the little red dot on the screen.  The distance is 13.1 billion light years, the mass 100 billion stars. They just discovered the impossible. Impossibly early, impossibly massive galaxies.

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-   At this distance, the light took 13 billion years to reach us, so we are seeing the galaxies at a time when the universe was only 700 million years old, barely 5% of its current age of 13.8 billion years. If this is true, this galaxy has formed as many stars as our present-day Milky Way.

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-    Could we have discovered astronomy's missing link? There has been a long-standing puzzle in galaxy formation. As we look out in space and back in time, we see the "corpses" of fully formed, mature galaxies appear seemingly out of nowhere around 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

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-    These galaxies have stopped forming stars. Dead galaxies, we call them, and some astronomers are obsessed with them. The stellar ages of these dead galaxies suggest they must have formed much earlier in the universe, but Hubble has never been able to spot their earlier, living stages because it could not see in the infrared light.

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-    Early dead galaxies are truly bizarre creatures, packing as many stars as the Milky Way, but in a size 30 times smaller. Imagine an adult, weighing 100 kilos, but standing 6 centimeters tall. Our little red dots are equally bizarre. They look like baby versions of the same galaxies, also weighing in at 100 kilos, with a height of 6 centimeters.

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-   There is a problem, however. These little red dots have too many stars, too early. Stars form out of hydrogen gas, and fundamental cosmological ("Big Bang") theory makes hard predictions on how much gas is available to form stars.

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-   To produce these galaxies so quickly, you almost need all the gas in the universe to turn into stars at near 100% efficiency. And that is very hard, which is the scientific term for impossible. This discovery could transform our understanding of how the earliest galaxies in the universe formed.

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-    The implication is that there is different channel, a fast track, that produces monster galaxies very quickly, very efficiently. A fast track for the top 1%.

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-   In a way, each of these candidates can be considered a "black swan." The confirmation of even one would rule out our current "all swans are white" model of galaxy formation, in which all early galaxies grow slowly and gradually.

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-   The first step to solve this mystery is to confirm the distances with spectroscopy, where we put the light of each of these galaxies through a prism, and split it into its rainbow-like fingerprint. This will tell us the distance to 0.1% accuracy.

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-    It will also tell us what is producing the light, whether it is stars or something else more exotic.

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-    JWST already targeted one of the six candidate massive galaxies and it turned out to be a distant baby quasar. A quasar is a phenomenon that occurs when gas falls into a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy and starts to shine brightly.

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-    This is really exciting on the one hand, because the origin of supermassive black holes in galaxies is not understood either, and finding baby quasars might just hold the key. On the other hand, quasars can outshine their entire host galaxy, so it is impossible to tell how many stars are there and whether the galaxy is really that massive.

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-    Could that be the answer for all of them? Baby quasars everywhere? Probably not, but it will take another year to investigate the remaining galaxies and find out.  Stay tuned, there is more astronomy to go. 

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May 27, 2023       JAMES WEBB  -  telescope discoveries May, 2023           4027                                                                                                                       

--------  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---

---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com ----- 

--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews

---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Saturday, May 27, 2023  ---------------------------------

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4026 - UNIVERSE - by the Numbers

-  4026 -  UNIVERSE  -   by the Numbers.   Astronomers do not know why the constants in nature, the constants in the universe, are the numbers that they are.  But, they do know that if they were just a few percentage points different than what they are, the Universe would not exist as we know it.  The numbers are what they are or we would not be here to think about it.

----------------------  4026  - UNIVERSE  -   by the Numbers

-  We know the age of the Universe is 13,800,000,000 years old.  If we have a telescope that can look back at the beginning we could see a galaxy that was formed 100,000,000 after the Big Bang.  It has taken that galaxy’s light 13,700,000,000 years to reach us.  We say the galaxy is 13,700,000,000 lightyears distant.

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-   However, the Universe has been expanding over that length of time.  Actually, the distance is 78,000,000,000 light years between us and that galaxy today.  That is about as far as we can see, since we cannot see beyond the beginning of the Universe.  To us it appears as if we are at a center of an Observerable Universe that is a sphere 156,000,000,000 lightyears in diameter.

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-  Astronomers measure the geometry of the Universe to be “flat”.  Therefore the Universe had to have a rapid “Inflation” of expansion in the first instants of the Big Bang. This means that the Universe that is outside our Observable Universe is 100 times larger, or, 1,560,000,000,000 lightyears in diameter.

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-   The volume of the sphere we can see is 1/10,000 the size of the actual Universe that is out there.  What’s worse is that what we see in the Observerable Universe is only 4% of what is there.  96% is Dark Matter and Dark Energy. So, actually, we can see only     4 / 1,000,000 of our entire Universe.

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-  (So, as a comparison the Pacific Ocean is 13,740 feet deep.  If we could see only 8 inches below the surface and did not know what was beyond that is the percentage of our knowledge available to us.)

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-  The speed of light is one of the fundamental constants in the Universe.  The speed of light is the same always and everywhere.  There are several “thought to be fundamental constants in the Universe” that are absolutely unchanging over time, and over space. 

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-------------------------------------  Examples are:

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--------------  the mass of an electron, Me  =  9.1*10^-31 kilograms

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--------------  the force of gravity,       G = 6.6*10^-11 meters^3/kilogram / second^2

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--------------   the electromagnetic force,  9*10^9 Newton * meter^2/ coulomb^2

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--------------  the speed of light. c = 3*10^8 meters / second

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-  The trouble with these fundamental numbers is that they are man-made depending on the units that man has defined.  Inches, pounds, kilometers are simply man’s definitions used in measurements. 

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-  On an Alien planet they would not recognize these numbers even though what they were measuring was exactly the same, just in different units.  Why can’t we define these fundamental constants in unitless numbers?  We can!

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-  Take Pi for example.  If an Alien measures the circumference of any circle divided by the diameter of that circle he will get the same number, 3.14, regardless of the units of measurement he is using.  If we measure the diameter of the circle to be 10 inches, we will measure the circumference of that circle to be 31.4 inches.  Making our fundamental constants ratio solves the problem of having units.  Pi is unitless 3.14.

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-  The mass of every electron is 9.1093897*10^-31 kilograms,  the mass of every proton is 1.6726231*10^-27 kilograms.  If we take the ratio 9.1 / 16,726 * 10^-31 we get a unitless ratio of 1/1836.  Aliens on the other planets will get the same number,       1 / 1836.

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-  The Fine Structure Constant is 1/137 with no units.  It is the ratio of the speed of an orbiting electron divided by the speed of light.

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-  Planck’s Constant of Action =  “h”  =  1.05*10^-34 kilogram * meters^2 /second.  “h” is the energy of every photon when multiplied by the frequency of the photon’s oscillation.  We can develop units using “h” and “G”, the Gravitational Constant, and “c” the Constant Speed of Light by setting h, G,  c equal to 1 and normalizing the formulas in the form of Planck Units.

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-  Setting Gravitational Constant, the Speed of Light, Planck’s Constant of Action  =  1.

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------------------   G  =  c  =  h  =  1

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------------------  Next we define Planck time, Planck length, Planck Mass,  Planck Density using these new Planck Units.

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-------------------  Time^2  =  h*G / c^5

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-------------------   Time  =  5.4*10^-44 seconds.

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-------------------  This is the shortest unit of time, theoretically  See Review #6 “ The Big Bang’s First Creations”  and Review #368 “  Time Comes to Us in Particles” for all the math calculations.

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-----------------------  Time  =  10^-44

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-------------------  Length^2  =  h * G / c^3

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-------------------  Length  =  1.6*10^-35 meters.

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--------------------  This is the smallest lump of space.  Planck Time is the time it would take a photon to cross a Planck Length

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-------------------  Length  =  10^-35

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-------------------  Mass^2  =  h*c / G 

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-------------------  Mass  =  2.2*10^-8 kilograms

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-------------------  Density  =  c^5 / h * nG^3

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-------------------  Density  =  5.1*10^96  kilograms / meter^2

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------------------  Density  =  10^-96 grams per cubic centimeter.

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-  If you use these Planck Units to measure the size of the  Universe you get:

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-----------------------  Diameter  =  5.4*10^61

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-----------------------  Age  8*10^60

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-----------------------  Mass  =  100,000

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----------------------  Temperature  =  1.9*10^-32, instead of 2.73 degrees  Kelvin.

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-  Note that in Planck Units the size of the Universe and the Age of the Universe are both 10^61.  This is a strange coincidence that I can not explain.

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-  Martin Reese is an astronomer who came up with just 6 numbers to describe the forces shaping the Universe.

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----------------    The first is the ratio of the strength of the electromagnetic force to the force of gravity.

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--------------------  Force e / Force G  =  10^36 unitless

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--------------  Force e / Force G  =  100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

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--------------------  The force of gravity is very weak compared to the electromagnetic force.  But, if there were just a few less zeros only a miniature world could exist.  Life could grow no larger than insects and there would be too little time for biological evolution to happen.

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----------------   The strength of the Strong and Weak Nuclear forces that bind protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of atoms.

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-----------------  Force E  =  0.007  unitless

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-----------------  This is the force that transmutes hydrogen, ie. protons,  into all the atoms in the periodic table.  If Force E were 0.006 or 0.008 the Universe would not exist.

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------------------   The ratio of the amount of matter-energy in the Universe to the Critical Density that is needed to balance the force of gravity with expansion so expansion stops at time infinity.  ( See Review #1050 for a discussion of Critical Density, “ The Universe Almost Didn’t Happen”.)

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--------------------   D / CD  =  0.4

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------------------   The Cosmological Constant in Einstein’s formula for the expansion of the Universe.  The Cosmological Constant is very, very small other wise it would have stopped stars and galaxies from forming.  Constant  =  10^-39 grams  / cubic centimeter.

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------------------   The ratio of gravitational energy required to pull galaxies apart to the energy equivalent of the galaxy’s mass.  Gravity G  /  Energy M  =  1/100,000. unitless.

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------------------   The number of spatial dimensions in the Universe.

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-----------------  D  =  3

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-  Astronomers do not know why the constants in nature, the constants in the universe are the numbers that they are.  But, they do know that if they were just a few percentage points different than what they are, the Universe would not exist as we know it.  The numbers are what they are or we would not be here to think about it.

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May 27, 2023           UNIVERSE  -   by the Numbers.               1051       4020                                                                                                                        

--------  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---

---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com ----- 

--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews

---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Saturday, May 27, 2023  ---------------------------------

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