Transcript

02-1-BangToSol

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101-LabIntro
KEVIN:
Hey Chaucer how did the CounterClockWise Organization get started.

CHAUCER:
You know that’s a story that goes back to the beginning of time.

DIANA:
Time had a beginning?

CHAUCER:
Indeed it did, Diana. Jeeves let’s start the show..

105 BangToProtons
JEEVES:
The universe itself was created in an enormous explosion some 13.7 billion years
ago. Before that explosion, there was no time, no space, no energy, and no
matter.
Right there in that first instant, time began, …and space? Well there was so
much pure energy all of a sudden, that space itself couldn’t stand it…so from
just about nothing, space zoomed faster than thought to enormous size… good
thing too because gravity was about to squeeze that baby universe back into the
nothingness it came from.

That first zoom happened a whole lot faster than the speed of light and is called
inflation. Since then the universe has expanded at a more pedestrian speed of
light. At the incredible temperatures and energies of that first instant, nothing,
not even matter was stable and as quick as it could form, it turned back into pure
energy.

But as the universe expanded, it cooled, and gradually, the basic pieces of
normal matter were formed from that incredible energy. Quarks were the first
particles to form. Today, quarks only exist in tightly bound groups, but back then,
space was so small and quarks were squeezed so close together that they were
not bound to other specific quarks. The colors of these quarks just represent a
property that attracts them to one another.

There are two kinds of quarks (physicists call them flavors of quarks) in normal
matter… there’s the UP quark and the DOWN quark.

As space got bigger, quarks lost their freedom and found themselves locked into
groups of three inside a proton or a neutron.

A proton is formed from two up quarks and one down quark while its slightly
heavier cousin, the neutron, is composed of two down quarks and one up quark.

Just about every proton and every neutron in existence today was formed at the
time of inflation and was crammed into that primordial basketball.

110-nucleii
At this point, every neutron was in a desperate race for its life. Since neutrons
can only exist for about 20 minutes on their own, every neutron either decayed or
got together with a proton to form a kind of hydrogen or two neutrons got
together with two protons to form a nucleus of Helium. All of this happened
within the very first minute of existence of the baby universe.

115-Atoms
Electrons were the final basic particles to freeze out of the energy soup. But the
energy density was still way too high for electrons to join together with the other
particles…and the early universe remained a glowing, cloudy plasma.
This condition lasted for almost 300,000 years while the universe grew and
cooled. Finally it was cool enough for the electrons to be captured by the
hydrogen and helium nuclei and the first atoms were formed.

Suddenly, light could race thru the universe without bumping into charged
particles and the universe became transparent and dark -- filled mostly with
clouds of hydrogen and helium gas. The light released at that time is still visible
today as the cosmic microwave background.

120 Stars
So, how did an almost perfectly dark and smooth universe become littered with
stars? Inflation itself caused the first tiny ripples in the density of matter and over
a period of about ten million years, matter increasingly gathered at these denser
locations. After one hundred million years the center of each cloud evolved into
a star as massive as a hundred suns. Across the universe, these first generation
stars lit their furnaces as their cores became hot and dense enough for nuclear
fusion. The universe emerged from the Dark Ages.

125 SuperNova
Because of their huge sizes, these first stars burned with a frenzy and converted
their supplies of hydrogen and helium fuel into the first heavy elements.
Essentially all the atoms in the universe heavier than helium were born in the
hearts of stars.

IN a short three million years their fuel was spent, and these first stars collapsed
and exploded as supernovas… spewing their newborn heavy elements out into
the universe. This new composition of heavier elements made it a lot easier for
gravity to squeeze THESE clouds of matter into new generations of stars.

130 Galaxies
It took another five hundred million years for gravity to do its work on this new
mixture of hydrogen, helium, and heavier elements. Thousands and millions of
second generation stars were born from these clouds. Small groups of these
new stars were drawn to each other gravitationally and merged to form ever
larger and larger groups. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is an example of a
spiral galaxy born in this early era. Today it contains about 200 billion stars, and
it is still growing as it absorbs small neighboring clusters of stars.

135-GalCenter
The center of our galaxy is a raging dynamo of tremendous power. And it’s
natural to wonder what could provide such awesome energies? (Black Holes…)
(spoken with an echo)
When a large star is nearing the end of its life, it can collapse under the pressure
of its own gravity and become a black hole. These weird bodies are called black
holes because they swallow everything that comes close enough – even light
itself. The process though is anything but dark and serene.

This is a photo taken by the Chandra telescope showing stars near the center of
our galaxy radiating fiercely as they speed to their deaths under the pull of black
holes. They are traveling at millions of miles per hour and are being torn apart in
the process. There are millions of black holes in our galaxy and the biggest of
them all is the one at the center. This monster has the mass of three million
suns. Its appetite is voracious and it swallows everything in its neighborhood –
even other black holes. Probably every large galaxy in the universe has a
monster black hole at its center.

140 Distribution
Until recently we thought that galaxies were the largest structures in the universe
and that they were pretty evenly distributed.

But now we recognize that galaxies join together to form clusters, super clusters,
walls, and filament shapes. The Milky Way is a member of a group of 20 or 30
galaxies and star clusters called our local group. The largest galaxy in this group
is our sister spiral galaxy, Andromeda.

Larger groups, called super clusters, may contain thousands of galaxies. The
nearest of these is the Virgo super cluster towards which we are being inexorably
drawn (Can you fell the tug?)

This is a map of all the clusters and super clusters within a billion light years of
earth. Represented here are some two-hundred million galaxies… and this is still
less than one thousandth of the known universe. From small beginnings, the
universe has prospered!

145 Sol
Four point six billion years ago, our solar system started to form about two thirds
of the way out on one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. Our sun and its
planets condensed under the pressure of gravity until the sun was hot and dense
enough to light its own nuclear fires. The inner planets are small and rocky with
heavy elements while the outer planets tend to be large gas giants.

Our sun is an average-sized star but it dwarfs the planets. Earth is the tiny
planet third from the left.

While it would take light itself over six hours to travel from the sun to Pluto, let’s
take a quick tour of our solar system…
The planet Mercury is closest to the sun,
followed next by our sister planet, Venus.
Our own Earth is third.
Our neighbor, Mars.
Jupiter is the first and largest of the gas giants –
followed by Saturn with its glorious rings.
Uranus rolls on its side.
Neptune is a blue world.
Followed last by ex-planet Pluto
and even traveling at the speed of light it would take us more than four years to
get to the nearest star.

160-LabEnd
KEVIN:
All very interesting, Chaucer, but what has all that to do with the
CounterClockWise Organization ?

CHAUCER:
You know that’s a story that goes back to the beginning of time.

DIANA:
Time had a beginning?

KEVIN:
DejaVu all over again – NOW I think you guys are pulling my leg!

CHAUCER:
THAT’s another story that goes back to the beginning of time.

KEVIN(interrupting):
ENOUGH – I am out-o-here.