Exploding Universe

If the universe exploded into existence, it probably looked something like a firework. It probably made a loud noise, too and left trails of sulfur smoke trailing through the young vacuum of space.

If the universe exploded, and there was no one there to hear it, did it make a noise?

Of course, maybe it was backwards. Maybe it didn't explode into the dark, maybe it exploded into light. Maybe everything was made of light originally, then a virus in the system caused an explosion of dark matter... which is now winning... or something. If that were the case, it probably looked more like this:

Either way, I'd say it probably looked very cool.

Instead of looking at the history of the U.S. (today is the 4th of July, after all), let's take a look at the history of the universe.

At second 0, it popped into existence, in some way or another.

At second 10^-43 seconds, it was really hot. So hot, in fact, that electromagnetism, gravitation, weak nuclear interaction, and strong nuclear interaction were unified. Like a really awesome (and useful) super hero.

Between 10^-43 seconds and 10^-36 seconds the universe began to expand and cool. As it cooled, electromagnetism, gravitation, weak nuclear interaction, and strong nuclear interaction began to separate.

Between 10^-36 and 10^-12 seconds, the four forces separated.

Then, supersymmetry broke, and quark-gluon plasma filled the universe.

By 1 second, the quark gluon plasma had cooled to the point that hadrons formed. Neutrons began to decouple and travel freely through space.

At 10 seconds, the temperature had fallen. It was cold, like the North Pole--so cold, that new lepton and anti-lepton pairs ceased to be born. The reigning race slowly began to fade.

Between 10 seconds and 380,000 years, photons took violent control, carefully and thoroughly usurping the dying reign of the leptons. Their 380,000 year minus 10 seconds reign was primarily characterized by their rowdy interactions with charged protons, elections, and nuclei.

There were a couple of important events during the reign of the protons. For starters, the temperature fell at a rapid rate between 3 and 20 minutes. This allowed for atomic nuclei to form--ultimately resulting in nuclear fusion. This is important because it is by nuclear fusion that all matter is created. We are stardust, you know.

At 70,000 years, cold, dark matter began to dominate the space that is now the universe.

Jump to 377,000 years. The density of the universe fell, and hydrogen and helium atoms began to form. As the universe cooled, elements began to recombine, and by the end, photons traveled freely and the universe had become transparent.

Then over millions and billions years, small structures formed. Stars and quasars formed. Plasma became the universe's reigning race. Millions of stars began to form, and pushed forward the process of turning lighter elements into heavier elements. Clusters of stars formed, then superclusters, solar systems, and galaxies. Planets, asteroids, and black holes littered the space between stars. 

People and animals exist on at least one small planet, and probably more.

The universe is probably about 13.75 billion years old. It will die, although not anytime soon. Most predict a Big Freeze, although others suggest a Big Crunch, a Big Rip, or being cooked, sometime in the next twenty billion years from now (or 100 billion or 10^14 billion--take your pick).

Either way, if you happen to be there, your best bet is to wear layers.

Imagining the Universe with Kitty Litter

If you imagine the universe, instead of as what exists beyond the the thin layer of elements that separate us from everything, but as an endless expanse of darkness with droplets of stars floating in determined circles around massive all-consuming, all-absorbing black holes, you'll discover that this is impossible. No matter how hard I know that the universe is thirteen billion years old, that stars are so massive it could take 1100 years to fly around one (a big one) in a jet plane, that millions and billions of these objects inhabit the rest of the dark, vast expanse of everything--in my head the looming rent bill still seems bigger.

When I see this picture-- 

--the biggest thing I can imagine is a dust storm blowing over cities and farms and continents. But this picture represents the birthing process of stars: the Orion Nebula having babies as big as or bigger than our sun, far bigger than our Earth, and incomprehensibly larger than me.

I'm a girl. Sometimes I feel fat. Well. Here's the thing:

Watch this. 

I'm not fat.

I like to imagine the universe. I spend hours and days and months and eventually years trying to picture it, to capture it with words or pictures or simply with thought, but I never will. I also don't care. Despite the immense impossibility of ever understanding the whole thing, it still fills me with wonder (which is a great feeling), reminds me that there's so much more to find and see than the little things that sit in front of me everyday, and it makes even the most mundane seem valuable.

Our magnificent universe, working and working without ever stopping, building and destroying, thinking and innovating; our magnificent universe, functioning in perfect rhythm, ignoring tiny little me who so admires its beauty and grace but still creating the perfect conditions for my existence; our magnificent universe filled with massive stars and planets, made of every element imaginable, filled with black holes and galaxies, life and death and existence, is swirling around itself, dying and breathing and living, and I am lucky enough to be allowed to change the kitty litter.




For more cool things about the size of the universe, check this!

Stripes Had Better Be In

On Friday Dave took me to the beach. The water was a bit chilly. I know this because I took off my shoes and played tag with the ocean. I also picked up a rock. It has stripes.

You know what else has stripes? The sky. 

Last week the sun blasted us with charged particles. It disrupted high frequency radio waves for two days. The sun is beginning a cycle of regular solar storms, which should occur about once a month through 2013. They won't all hit us, of course--the sun is a sphere and could hiccup in any given direction, towards the Earth or not. These light shows--called aurora borealis in the North and aurora australis in the South--create some of the most beautiful skies ever visible on Earth.


Awesome thing number one: one charged particle is just a charged particle. But a collection of charged particles is actually plasma. A lot of science fiction stories include plasma guns--weapons that spout ionized gases that disrupt robotic systems, destroy living matter, and generally cause all sorts of excited chaos. Well guess what. The sun does this to us all the time.

Awesome thing number two: the sun does not hate us (or love us, take your pick)--other planets have auroras too. Jupiter continues to be my favourite planet. Check out this sweet picture of Jupiter's aurora:

 

 That made me think, "I wonder what our aurora looks like from space?" Someone else thought of that too. Someone who actually gets to go to space.

 

Awesome thing number three: sometimes the Sun practices exploding. On these nights the Earth dresses up, like for a fancy dress party, sparkling with gems and plasma jewelry, the princess of the solar system. And we are just little germs, scurrying around on the surface building castles and highways, afraid that our communications systems will be disrupted by the sun.


One day I want to go to Alaska. I will plan my trip around projected solar flares. If I do it right, maybe I can see the aurora over the ocean. I'll take my striped rock and wear pinstriped pants and a striped scarf. If I'm lucky, stripes will even be in that season. Otherwise I will have to be uncool. Uncool, perhaps, but happy.

How to Survive the End of the World

The first trick to surviving the end of the world is knowing exactly what will happen--telling the future, if you will. Luckily, I, by my great mental prowess and my ability to use Google Search, know exactly what will happen in 11 months and 14 days.

First, the Mayan Calendar will end on December 21, 2012. The calendar began in 3,114 BC and has not stopped ticking for over 5,000 years. Its end marks the Y2K of multiple millenniums as well as the end of the human race, a polar shift, violent earthquakes, and a Venus transit (Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun).

Next, the planet Niribu will return, a planet with a super long and super elliptical orbit that passes through every 3000+ years. On this planet lives a race called the Annunaki, a race who long ago encouraged us to be more civilized, after they enslaved us. They will probably enslave us again. If not, then the return of their planet will probably throw Earth off its axis or they crash into us.

As Niribu approaches, the sun will begin to have massive solar storms. These massive solar flares and spouts will have a dreadful impact on our communications networks and our satellite systems. The massive disruptions in the sun's magnetic field will cause a magnetic field about-face here on Earth. This will cause nuclear power plants to meltdown. That can't be good. For your instruction, take a look at this picture of the sun, borrowed from the National Geographic website:

It's beautiful. But it will probably kill us.

(On the bright side, we are sending the first commercial flight to the space station next month!)

The end of the world promises to be horrendous. But I promised you a method for survival. And I have one. It is so great, so stupendous, that no one has thought of it before. It is a method that is beyond comprehension:

Move to Russia.

Why? Russia is a massive continent with few people and a lot of bears. It is frigidly cold, and has large quantities of untapped resources. But really, why Russia?

If the sun explodes, it won't matter where you live. If the sun flares--well, there's no cell phone service in Siberia anyway, so the it won't disrupt communication. If the planet heats up a lot, well, it's cold up there, so it should just warm up to tolerable temperatures. And if there's a nuclear meltdown, the effects probably won't reach all the way up there. And if the Annunaki come to enslave us, they'll go straight to NYC and Tokyo, because that's where all the people are, while you are building the resistance in the middle of nowhere. Plus, you'll have bears on your side. If the poles switch, your compasses will simply aim at the rest of the world instead of spinning around in circles. Earthquakes? Russia's smack dab on the middle of the Eurasian tectonic plate, so they'll just float around while the rest of the world is torn to shreds.

Learn how to farm, move to Russia, and you can ride out the calamity like a surfer on an epic wave.

I will see you there.

The Day the Sun Got Littler

This morning I couldn't see the sun because a dull cover of grey clouds ensconced the chunk of landmass where I live. But there I sat, still contemplating the sun and her magnificent death rays and reading her online dating profile, when I surprised myself by thinking, "well, that's not very big!" To put it in context, consider the two freaking gigantic black holes recently discovered by some astronomers in California. The article states, "Both encompass regions or 'event horizons' about five times the distance from the sun to Pluto." 


So I decided to do some math.


Math can be quite inspiring.


The distance from Pluto to the Sun is 3.67 billion miles*. 3.67 billion miles times 5 is 18.35 billion miles across, a number that is impossible to grasp. For help understanding big numbers, ask xkcd. Basically, the span of the biggest black hole's event horizon stretches for this number of miles:

18,350,000,000 miles

My next step involved finding out the size of the sun, because the sun is the biggest thing I know and can see and with which I mayhaps have some sort of understanding. So I read about the sun... heat... fire... solar system... moon... mass... distance... earth...

diameter: 864,938 miles.

And I thought to myself, "well, that's not very big."


Of course the Earth is smaller than the sun, and the continents and oceans are smaller than the Earth, and you could keep going like this until you get to quarks, but compared to the vastness of the universe, the sun isn't very big. Neither are we.


But who cares? Because we have great big minds which try ever so hard to encompass great big ideas which are mind boggling and socket blowing and bubble popping all at the same time; and despite our desperately diminutive state of existence, we will continue to build whopping big robots that explode from the surface of the earth in search of life on other planets, we'll still jump in front of trains to save a little girl's life, and we'll still continue to fight with each other, just to prove that we're right.


*Speaking of Pluto, the probe which is set to reach the not-quite planet in 2015, moved closer to Pluto than any probe before it three days ago.) 

A Sad Candle

There are certain types of weather which are perfect for lighting candles. Well, they would be if I didn't buy cheap candles that burn out after only an hour of use.

For example, yesterday the sky was grey and the trees were orange. Rain droplets pelted down from the clouds, smacking the leaves hard enough to make them wave, but without enough force to break them from their parent--more like a slap on the wrist than a spanking. The wind shoved the branches of the trees back and forth, but luckily, trees are able to stand up against most winds.

This sort of weather is not classified as a storm, but more of a wet drizzle with an extra helping of cloud.

A storm looks more like this: a powerfully angry agglomerate of air smashing into the trunks of trees with the force of the Roman Army, so that the trees bow to the majesty of the winds; millions of beads of water falling simultaneously like bombs, exploding painfully as they crash into skin and leaves and dirt; rumbling thunder serenading the fury of world below; spikes of electricity piercing the earth with sparks and fire and pain.

Earth storms can be quite exhilarating. Then the sun comes out, and the blue-skied weather is beautiful once more.

But then the sun storms. These storms are far more terrifying than anything you can imagine. The sun is already a behemothic ball of writhing snakes of fire, contorting and twisting, blazing at fifteen million degrees Celsius. But when the sun storms, tongues of fire reach out into the blackness of space, towards Venus and Mercury and Earth, releasing the same amount of magnetic energy as hundreds of 100-ton hydrogen bombs exploding simultaneously.

If you were there, you would die.

Our sun will never have the storm of all storms, releasing all of it's energy at once, exploding itself and all surrounding planets and moons into the vast space, where the left over pieces will drift away, eventually crashing into other planets and suns and black holes. Instead it will merely burn out.

Like a sad candle. Which I will then use to light my house when it drizzles.

Moskowitz, Clara. "Giant Sunspot Releases Massive Solar Flare." 4 November 2011. http://www.space.com/13517-giant-sunspot-unleashes-massive-solar-flare.html Accessed 5 November 2011.

"What is a solar flare?" NASA. http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/sftheory/flare.htm Accessed 5 November 2011.

"Ask an astronomer: is the sun expanding? Will it every explode?" Cornell University. 10 February 2006. http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=232 Accessed 5 November 2011.