The mind-blowing answer comes from a theory describing the birth of the universe in the first instant of time. The universe has long captivated us with its immense scales of distance and time. How far does it stretch? Where does it end... and what lies beyond its star fields... and streams of galaxies extending as far as telescopes can see? These questions are beginning to yield to a series of extraordinary new lines of investigation... and technologies that are letting us to peer into the most distant realms of the cosmos... But also at the behavior of matter and energy on the smallest of scales. Remarkably, our growing understanding of this kingdom of the ultra-tiny, inside the nuclei of atoms, permits us to glimpse the largest vistas of space and time. In ancient times, most observers saw the stars as a sphere surrounding the earth, often the home of deities. The Greeks were the first to see celestial events as phenomena, subject to human investigation... rather than the fickle whims of the Gods. One sky-watcher, for example, suggested that meteors are made of materials found on Earth... and might have even come from the Earth. Those early astronomers built the foundations of modern science. But they would be shocked to see the discoveries made by their counterparts today. The stars and planets that once harbored the gods are now seen as infinitesimal parts of a vast scaffolding of matter and energy extending far out into space. Just how far... began to emerge in the 1920s. Working at the huge new 100-inch Hooker Telescope on California's Mt. Wilson, astronomer Edwin Hubble, along with his assistant named Milt Humason, analyzed the light of fuzzy patches of sky... known then as nebulae. They showed that these were actually distant galaxies far beyond our own. Hubble and Humason discovered that most of them are moving away from us. The farther out they looked, the faster they were receding. This fact, now known as Hubble's law, suggests that there must have been a time when the matter in all these galaxies was together in one place. That time... when our universe sprung forth... has come to be called the Big Bang. How large the cosmos has gotten since then depends on how long its been growing... and its expansion rate. Recent precision measurements gathered by the Hubble space telescope and other instruments have brought a consensus... That the universe dates back 13.7 billion years. Its radius, then, is the distance a beam of light would have traveled in that time ... 13.7 billion light years. That works out to about 1.3 quadrillion kilometers. In fact, it's even bigger.... Much bigger. How it got so large, so fast, was until recently a deep mystery. That the universe could expand had been predicted back in 1917 by Albert Einstein, except that Einstein himself didn't believe it... until he saw Hubble and Humason's evidence. Einstein's general theory of relativity suggested that galaxies could be moving apart because space itself is expanding. So when a photon gets blasted out from a distant star, it moves through a cosmic landscape that is getting larger and larger, increasing the distance it must travel to reach us. In 1995, the orbiting telescope named for Edwin Hubble began to take the measure of the universe... by looking for the most distant galaxies it could see. Taking the expansion of the universe into account, the space telescope found galaxies that are now almost 46 billion light years away from us in each direction... and almost 92 billion light years from each other. And that would be the whole universe... according to a straightforward model of the big bang. But remarkably, that might be a mere speck within the universe as a whole, according to a dramatic new theory that describes the origins of the cosmos. It's based on the discovery that energy is constantly welling up from the vacuum of space in the form of particles of opposite charge... matter and anti-matter.
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Added: 597 days ago by
ishare
Runtime: 01:00 |
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Birth And Death Of The Universe
Hubble Space Telescope - 15 Years of Discovery (Episode 8): Birth And Death Of The Universe. In the 15 years that the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has orbited Earth, it has taken three-quarters of a million photographs of the cosmos. --- Please subscribe to Science & Reason: • http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience • http://www.youtube.com/ScienceMagazine • http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker --- In many ways Hubble is the most successful scientific project in the World, and this event is not likely to go unnoticed. The European Space Agency, ESA, has decided to celebrate this anniversary with the production of a Hubble 15th Anniversary movie called "Hubble - 15 Years Of Discovery". The movie covers all aspects of the Hubble Space Telescope project: a journey through the history, the trouble and the scientific successes of Hubble. This portrait of one of the biggest scientific projects of all time contains large amounts of previously unpublished footage in uncompromised quality. With the beautiful backdrop of Hubbles visual image treasures running as a red line through the movie, the light and dreaming style tells the most interesting stories about our fascinating Universe and about the change of vision that Hubble has brought us. --- The Hubble Space Telescope (HST), named after Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953) who was one of the great pioneers of modern astronomy, is a collaboration between ESA and NASA. It is a long-term, space-based observatory. The observations are carried out in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light. In many ways Hubble has revolutionised modern astronomy, not only by being an efficient tool for making new discoveries, but also by driving astronomical research in general. During 15 years of viewing the sky, Hubble has taken more than 700000 exposures of more than 22 000 celestial objects. The spacecraft itself has whirled around Earth nearly 88 000 times, travelling more than 4000 million kilometres. The orbiting observatory generates enough data every day - about 15 gigabytes - to fill more than three DVDs, and in total it has produced 23 terabytes of data, equal to the amount of text in 23 million novels. Over 3900 astronomers from all over the world have used the telescope, and compiled a long list of scientific achievements, published in more than 4000 papers, such as: - calculating the precise age of the Universe to be 13 700 million years old); - confirming the existence of a strange form of energy called dark energy; - detecting small proto-galaxies that emitted their light when the Universe was less than a 1000 million years old; - proving the existence of super-massive black holes; - seeing a comet hitting Jupiter; and - showing that the process of forming planetary systems is common throughout the galaxy. http://www.esa.int http://www.spacetelescope.org .
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Added: 720 days ago by
poker1
Runtime: 06:11 |
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15 Years of Science from Hubble Space Telescope
15th anniversary Hubble Minute on the top science discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. Images cover planets, comets, stars, galaxies and almost back to the beginning of time. The story leads up to Hubble's largest images ever revealed.
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Astronomy And Space
Added: 720 days ago by
poker1
Runtime: 03:21 |
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The Largest Black Holes in the Universe
We've never seen them directly, yet we know they are there, lurking within dense star clusters or wandering the dust lanes of the galaxy, where they prey on stars, or swallow planets whole. Our Milky Way may harbor millions of these black holes, the ultra dense remnants of dead stars. But now, in the universe far beyond our galaxy, there's evidence of something even more ominous: a breed of black holes that have reached incomprehensible size and destructive power. How big can they get? What's the largest so far detected? Where does an 18 billion solar mass black hole hide?
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Channels:
Astronomy And Space
Added: 720 days ago by
poker1
Runtime: 18:48 |
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