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Cosmology / 13.8 billion years, briefly

A short tour of everything that has ever happened — from a singularity smaller than a proton to a thin, cold sea of photons drifting through eternity.

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A short tour of everything that has ever happened — from a singularity smaller than a proton to a thin, cold sea of photons drifting through eternity. Key sections include: COSMOLOGY / 13.8 billion years, briefly.; The Hubble flash : galaxies are running away.; The Big Bang . Hot, dense, and everywhere at once.; Recombination — the universe goes transparent.; Dark ages → first stars.; Gravity sculpts the cosmic web.; Our galaxy: the Milky Way.; Dark matter: the books don’t balance.; The expansion is accelerating.; Stelliferous → degenerate → black-hole → heat death..

Key sections

01COSMOLOGY / 13.8 billion years, briefly.
02The Hubble flash : galaxies are running away.
03The Big Bang . Hot, dense, and everywhere at once.
04Recombination — the universe goes transparent.
05Dark ages → first stars.
06Gravity sculpts the cosmic web.
07Our galaxy: the Milky Way.
08Dark matter: the books don’t balance.
09The expansion is accelerating.
10Stelliferous → degenerate → black-hole → heat death.
11Open questions.
12Read & watch.

Topics covered

catalog science cosmology

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Slide outline

01COSMOLOGY / 13.8 billion years, briefly.
02The Hubble flash : galaxies are running away.
03The Big Bang . Hot, dense, and everywhere at once.
04Recombination — the universe goes transparent.
05Dark ages → first stars.
06Gravity sculpts the cosmic web.
07Our galaxy: the Milky Way.
08Dark matter: the books don’t balance.
09The expansion is accelerating.
10Stelliferous → degenerate → black-hole → heat death.
11Open questions.
12Read & watch.

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Presentation Transcript

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Slide 01

COSMOLOGY / 13.8 billion years, briefly.

● SLIDE 01 · OVERTURE
A short tour of everything that has ever happened — from a singularity smaller than a proton to a thin, cold sea of photons drifting through eternity.
13 slides
est. read 6 min
← / → / SPACE

Slide 02

The Hubble flash: galaxies are running away.

SLIDE 02 · 1929
Edwin Hubble plots distance against redshift and finds a line. The farther a galaxy, the faster it recedes. Space itself is stretching.
Hubble constant H₀ ≈ 70 km/s/Mpc
Redshift z = Δλ / λ — light wavelengths get longer as space expands
Implication: rewind the tape, and everything was once in one place.

Slide 03

The Big Bang. Hot, dense, and everywhere at once.

SLIDE 03 · t = 0
Not an explosion in space — an unfolding of space. In 10-32 s the universe inflates by a factor of 1026. The plasma cools. Quarks bind into protons. Nuclei form in the first three minutes.
10-43 sPlanck epochgravity decouples
10-32 sInflationspace stretches
10-6 sQuark soupmatter forms
3 minNucleosynthesisH, He, Li
380 kyrRecombinationlight escapes

Slide 04

Recombination — the universe goes transparent.

SLIDE 04 · t = 380,000 yr
Electrons finally bind to protons. Photons stop scattering and stream free. That first light, redshifted by a factor of about 1100, is the cosmic microwave background — the oldest photograph ever taken.
Temperature today: 2.725 K
Anisotropies: ± 1 part in 105 — seeds of every galaxy
Discovered 1965, Penzias & Wilson, Bell Labs
Watch → cosmic microwave background

Slide 05

Dark ages → first stars.

SLIDE 05 · t = 100 Myr
For 100 million years the universe is dim and neutral. Then gravity wins. Pristine clouds of hydrogen collapse and ignite as Population III stars — massive, hot, doomed. Their UV light reionizes the cosmos.
Pop III stars: ~ 100 – 1000 M⊙, no metals, lifetimes a few Myr
Reionization complete by z ≈ 6 — about a billion years in
Their supernovae seeded the cosmos with carbon, oxygen, iron — the stuff of us.

Slide 06

Gravity sculpts the cosmic web.

SLIDE 06 · LARGE-SCALE STRUCTURE
Tiny CMB ripples grow over billions of years into a foam of filaments, sheets, and voids. Galaxies form at the bright knots where filaments cross.
Voids span 102 Mpc across — mostly empty
Galaxy clusters live at filament intersections
Visible galaxies are foam on top of an invisible scaffold.

Slide 07

Our galaxy: the Milky Way.

SLIDE 07 · HOME
A barred spiral — one ordinary galaxy among hundreds of billions. We’re about two-thirds of the way out from the center, riding a minor arm.
Stars: ~ 100 × 109
Diameter: ~ 100,000 ly · thickness ~ 1,000 ly
Central black hole Sgr A*: ~ 4.1 × 106 M⊙
Mass dominated by an unseen dark-matter halo.

Slide 08

Dark matter: the books don’t balance.

SLIDE 08 · THE INVISIBLE MAJORITY
Stars at the edges of galaxies orbit too fast for the visible mass alone. Gravitational lensing maps mass that emits no light. Something is there — and there is a lot of it.
Ordinary matter ~ 5%
Dark matter ~ 27%
Dark energy ~ 68%
Doesn’t emit, absorb, or scatter light at any wavelength we’ve probed
Interacts gravitationally and (so far) only gravitationally
Candidates: WIMPs, axions, primordial black holes — or new physics entirely.

Slide 09

The expansion is accelerating.

SLIDE 09 · 1998 · SUPERNOVA SURVEYS
Two independent teams measure distant Type Ia supernovae and find them dimmer than expected. The universe is not just expanding — the expansion is speeding up. Something with negative pressure is pushing space apart.
Cosmological constant Λ — energy density of empty space
Equation of state w ≈ -1
2011 Nobel Prize: Perlmutter, Schmidt, Riess
We don’t know what it is. ~68% of everything.

Slide 10

Stelliferous → degenerate → black-hole → heat death.

SLIDE 10 · THE LONG NIGHT
If Λ holds, the cosmos cools and dilutes forever. Stars run out of hydrogen. White dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes are all that’s left. Eventually even those evaporate via Hawking radiation.
1014 yrStelliferous endslast red dwarfs die
1040 yrDegenerate eraprotons may decay
10100 yrBlack hole eraHawking evaporation
∞Heat deathmaximum entropy · thin photon sea

Slide 11

Open questions.

SLIDE 11 · UNFINISHED BUSINESS
A century of progress has only sharpened our ignorance. The biggest puzzles are also the most basic.
What is dark matter?
What is dark energy?
Why is Λ so small?
Why these constants?
Did inflation really happen?
Are we one of many universes?
Where did the matter / antimatter asymmetry come from?
Is the cosmos finite?

Slide 12

Slide 12

SLIDE 12 · CARL SAGAN
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980

Slide 13

Read & watch.

SLIDE 13 · FURTHER
Steven Weinberg — The First Three Minutes (1977)
Brian Greene — The Fabric of the Cosmos
Carl Sagan — Cosmos (book + 1980 series)
Sean Carroll — From Eternity to Here
Katie Mack — The End of Everything
YouTube → cosmic microwave background
YouTube → carl sagan pale blue dot
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