# Cosmology / 13.8 billion years, briefly

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Category: Science
Slides: 13
Updated: 2026-05-17T20:55:48.979Z
Tags: catalog, science, cosmology

## Summary

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..

## Slide Outline

1. COSMOLOGY / 13.8 billion years, briefly.
2. The Hubble flash : galaxies are running away.
3. The Big Bang . Hot, dense, and everywhere at once.
4. Recombination — the universe goes transparent.
5. Dark ages → first stars.
6. Gravity sculpts the cosmic web.
7. Our galaxy: the Milky Way.
8. Dark matter: the books don’t balance.
9. The expansion is accelerating.
10. Stelliferous → degenerate → black-hole → heat death.
11. Open questions.
12. Read & watch.

## Slide Transcript

### Slide 1: 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 2: 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 3: 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 4: 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 5: 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 6: 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 7: 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 8: 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 9: 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
- End of deck. Press ← to revisit, or close the tab and look up.


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