How was the universe made? Briefly.
“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust”, Prof. Laurence Krauss (The School of Life, Vimeo)Pic: BANG! Protons formed after the first millionth of a second; fusion ended after 3 minutes (Wikipedia)Chronology of the universe (Wikipedia)The Big Bang theory (ESA Kids)The Big Bang theory (GCSE, BBC)Everything in the universe came out of the Big Bang (Why-Sci)The initial singularity is proposed to have contained all the mass & spacetime of the universe...then bang! (Wikipedia)So what was there before the Big Bang?...There's no such thing as nothing (Jon Kaufman)What is nothing? Physics debate (livescience)Why is there something rather than nothing? (BBC)The beginning of time (Prof. Stephen Hawking)A mathematical proof that the universe could have formed spontaneously from nothing (The Physics arXiv Blog)Infographic: What is the cosmic microwave background? (Space.com)Protons are made of quarks (Wikipedia)Quark soup: Heavy ions & quark-gluon plasma (CERN)Matter/antimatter asymmetry: The dregs of the universe from whence we came (CERN)Antiprotons & protons (Encyclopaedia Britannica)After ~380,000 years, the universe starts to cool after expanding & also becomes transparent as photons of light can now travel around (Wikipedia)Lego (Lego Australia)Nothing much happened for a while, then stars & quasars started to form about ~150 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang (Wikipedia)Star formation (University of Oregon)What are stars made of? (Qualitative Reasoning Group, Northwestern University)How are planets formed? (Phys.org)What makes a planet? (Jean-Luc Margot, UCLA)The James Webb space telescope will help us understand the birth of stars & protoplanetary systems (JWST, NASA)How do scientists measure the temperature of the universe? (Science Alert)Astronomers measure the temperature of the universe 7.2 billion years ago (Sci Tech Daily)"The CMB (cosmic microwave background) is a snapshot of the oldest light in our universe, imprinted on the sky when the universe was just 380,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars & galaxies of today" (Wikipedia)Big Bang nucleosynthesis: Cooking up the first light elements (Einstein Online)Why did the universe start off with hydrogen, helium & not much else? (Starts with a bang!)The first stars in the universe: A comprehensive article by two guys who actually figured this stuff out (Scientific American)Hydrogen becomes a solid below 14.01 Kelvin (Wikipedia)"The first generation of stars lit up 560 million years after the Big Bang" (Wikipedia)What is E = mc^2 in simple terms (American Museum of Natural History)When was dust invented? 12.5 billion years ago! Along with gas, it helped form the early galaxies (ABC Australia)Stars are element-making factories that use a process called 'stellar nucleosynthesis' (Wikipedia)"We are all star dust": When a star dies all the stuff in it drifts across the universe & kicks things off elsewhere (About, Education)When did the first stars form? (Starchild, NASA)The horse head nebula: One of the beautiful dust clouds that are stellar nurseries (NASA)Once you've got the right ingredients, star formation can be triggered in various ways (Wikipedia)Types of stars (Enchanted Learning)Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams show certain properties of stars (Australia Telescope National Facility, CSIRO)Interactive Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (Las Cumbres Observatory)What are 'main sequence' stars? Most stars in our galaxy are like this, including the Sun (Australia Telescope National Facility, CSIRO)What is a red giant? Our Sun will become one eventually (Space.com)What is a brown dwarf? Hint: It's not Thorin Oakenshield at the beach, it's a transition between a star & a giant gas planet (Space.com)Accretion: The gas & dust left over from the Sun's formation clumped together over millions of years to form planets (Wikipedia)Our Sun's lifecycle began ~4.5 billion years ago & has ~4.5 to 5.5 billion to go (Universe Today)What makes a planet different from a star? (UCSB ScienceLine)Nuclear fission confirmed as source of more than half of Earth's heat (Scientific American)Ancient cosmic smack-up may have made Earth’s molten core (National Geographic)Gravitational tides: Planets stretch & squash moons & vice versa (Department of Astronomy, Case Western Reserve University)Tidal friction: The moon pushes & pulls Earth in different directions, deforming & warming the planet (HyperPhysics, Georgia State University)Formation & evolution of the solar system (Wikpedia)The Oort cloud: A theoretical shell of icy objects in the outermost reaches of the solar system (Space Facts)The Kuiper belt: Contains remnants of the solar system's formation (Space Facts)There used to be many 'planetary embryos', which then gravitationally interacted & collided to form the four terrestrial planets we know today (Wikipedia)Osmos: "Enter the Darwinian world of a galactic mote", Apple design award & iPad game of the year (iTunes)What is the solar system? Including a description of the differences between rocky & gassy planets (HubbleSite)Facts about our solar system's planets, in order (Space.com)Why are planets closer to the Sun more dense? (Space Answers)Pic: The planets in order, Mars is the last rocky planet (Pics About Space)Here's what the Sun looks like from every planet in our solar system (IFL Science)Debating the name of our solar system (Quora)NASA scientist, Jen Heldmann, describes how Earth’s moon was formed (SERVI, NASA)How the moon formed: Violent cosmic crash theory gets double boost (Space.com)Bogotá is 2,640 metres above sea level (Wikipedia)Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect (Wikipedia)Mercury is hot & hard (Space.com)New evidence suggests Mars had tectonic activity long ago (IFL Science)Mars has water ice at its poles, the highest mountain in the solar system & two tiny moons, Phobos & Deimos (Space.com)As our Sun dies, what will happen to the planets, especially our own? (The New York Times)What will happen to our solar system after the Sun dies? (Quora)Will the Sun have enough gravity to keep the planets in orbit after it becomes a white dwarf? (Quora)Book: Diaspora by Greg Egan (Wikipedia)Our Sun will eventually become a white dwarf, not a black hole (Black Hole Encyclopaedia)What is a galaxy? (Space Place, NASA)What is a galaxy? (HubbleSite)How is a galaxy formed? (Wikipedia)What are fractals? (Fractal Foundation)A supercluster is a group of galaxies (Wikipedia)The nearest superclusters (NASA)Our galaxy, the Milky Way, will probably collide & merge with Andromeda, forming 'Milkdromeda' (Futurism)Why are bubbles round? (UCSB ScienceLine)Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why galaxies & solar systems form disks - apparently our galaxy is as flat as a crepe! (Star Talk Radio, YouTube)Spiral galaxy formation (Cosmos, Swinburne University)What is a supermassive black hole? (Wikipedia)Talking mattresses in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker Wikia)Our night sky as the Milky Way & Andromeda galaxies merge (EarthSky)The 'heat death' of the universe (Wikipedia)DeliverooWant more? The Infinite Monkey Cage podcast: The recipe to build a universe (Overcast)Super cool animation to finish: Warning, this will make you feel VERY SMALL (Kurzgesagt, Devour)Corrections
Timeline of the Big Bang: Good summary if you want to know the specifics of what happened when, vs Johnny's rather loose estimates (The Physics of the Universe)Clarifying the definition of plasma: "A plasma can be created by heating a gas or subjecting it to a strong electromagnetic field, this decreases or increases the number of electrons, creating positive or negative ions, & is accompanied by the dissociation of molecular bonds, if present" (Wikipedia)When matter meets antimatter pure energy is released (CERN)It took ~380,000 years for electrons to be trapped in orbits around nuclei, forming the first atoms, not 1 million years (CERN)The core of a star like our Sun consists of gas in the 'plasmic state', no solid hydrogen (Wikipedia)The Sun is 865,000 miles across, not 5,000 miles (Space.com)New evidence may suggest Mars had tectonic activity (IFL Science)There appears to be conjecture about whether superclusters are bound by gravity (Wikipedia)Cheeky review? (If we may be so bold)
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