COSMOS Flashcards
What is singularity?
a spot that is so infinitesimally small and compact of all necessary ingredients to make a universe that there are no dimensions at all.
when was the big bang?
about 13.7-8 billion years ago
What was the first thing created out of the big bang?
1) energy (the four forces - gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak force) symmetrically broke off from one another as the universe slightly cooled.
2) matter (quarks congeal into protons and neutrons aka hadrons).
All this took about a second.
It was basically a big hot plasma of charged particles without structure or complexity.
Who initially proposed the concept of the big bang and when?
Georges Lemairtre (Belgian Priest Scholar)
Who originally proposed the concept that one can look deep into space for background radiation left from the big bang?
In 1940s - Russian astrophysicist - George Gamow (Георгий Гамов)
But who actually received the Nobel prize for ‘discovering’ the background noise?
in 1960s - Arno Penzias + Robert Wilson - they had no idea what it was. They eventually uncovered the mystery along with Robert Dicke and Princeton University.
What are the theories of what may have caused the big bang?
- the singularity is a relic of an earlier collapsed universe.
- ‘false vacuum’ that introduced instability into the nothingness.
- multiverse - there are many big bangs happening all the time, therefore our big bang was a transitional phase where one universe became another…
Explain how the universe was created.
Singularity leads to the big bang, inflation occurs of sudden expansion - as in objects moving away from one another.
At first, this is just a hot plasma of charged particles with no form.
When temperatures fell, protons and neutrons fused together to create nuclei and thus helium. Later elections fused with nuclei to create hydrogen.
Over the next 380k years, as the universe continues to inflate/ expand and cool, gravity started gathering hydrogen and helium gas into clouds.
150 million ++ years of gravity slowly gathering clouds of hydrogen and helium gas together will collapse the nebulous cloud into a disk that eventually gets so hot, it becomes yet another plasma. Eventually, the centre gets so hot that the outward pressure prevents gravity from further collapse = protostar - the outward pressure allows for a temporary hydrostatic equilibrium.
Gas continues to collect and add mass to the protostar, thus increasing gravity pull = heat rising to 10 mil degrees C for nuclear fusion to form, where hydrogen fuses helium. Thus becoming a star!
BASICALLY: a huge gas cloud collapses due to gravity with such exceptional force that it heated up tremendously and triggers fusion resulting in a spherical furnace with outward pressure that counteracts gravity.
This releases so much radiation that it causes reionization of surrounding nebulae. Also pushing the, away and thus promoting other stars to be born.
What is the structure of a star?
- core - protons fusing to create helium nuclei.
- radiation zone with storage of protons feeding the centre.
- photons making their way through the plasma
What properties are shared by all complex properties?
- emergent properties - compounds that bind into structures.
- stable consistent energy flow to bind simple compounds into complex structures.
Has complexity increased?
Astronomer Eric Chaisson posed that we can measure the levels of complexity by estimating the size of entity energy flows. His theory proves that energy flows increase significantly as we move from stars to planets to living organisms. Most of the universe is simple, yet the upper level of complexity has increased, thus living organisms are more complex than stars!
