Astronomical Tidbits
Jan 9, 2024
At the very birth of the universe, in the Big Bang, the first elements were forged: hydrogen and helium. These pristine elements make up about 62% of the atoms in your body! We are literally made of the leftover materials from the creation of our universe – Big Bang stuff!
As the universe continued to expand and cool, those first elements clumped together, forming the seeds for galaxies, stars, and eventually, planets like our own. One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe was the size of a pea! But according to Inflation theory, a period of rapid expansion quickly inflated the universe to its vast size.
For most of the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with a hot soup of particles. Eventually, denser areas within this soup began to collapse, forming the first stars. These stars are the ones we see as the distant points of light in the night sky. They are the “one-second sizzle of brightness” following the Big Bang, destined to settle into “eternal darkness” after they exhaust their fuel.
Our own star, the Sun, is one such furnace. In about 5 billion years, it will expand into a red giant, engulfing the inner planets and rendering Earth uninhabitable. But even after the stars die out, in about 120 trillion years, the universe will still be home to black holes – the remnants of massive stars – for an unimaginably long time.
So, as you gaze up at the Milky Way, that thick fuzzy band of hundreds of billion suns, remember – the iron in your blood, the very building blocks of your being, were likely forged in the hearts of those very stars you see. We are a precious mixture of atoms, a unique combination not likely to be found anywhere else in the vast observable universe, which is estimated to be around 92 billion light-years in diameter.
The universe is a place of immense scale, filled with wonder and a rich history. From the very first moments of the Big Bang to the eventual death of stars and black holes, it is a story written in light and matter, a story of which we are a part.
