Naked Science - Birth of the Universe

our

universe

the galaxies the solar system our home planet Earth land sea air life where they all come from look into space from our planet and what you see is a vast Cosmos filled with billions of stars and galaxies turned back the clock more than 13 thousand million years ago and our

universe

was a very different place back then it was so small that it fit inside the palm of your hand from this infant universe everything would be created Stars galaxies and the basic components of life itself the calcium in our bones the iron in our blood the atoms for the air we breathe the water we drink the raw materials for our city and

naked

machines

science

embarks on a journey through space and time to discover How the Universe was born and how it created everything in our world and how it will eventually make you die, everything we see around us is made of matter, atoms and molecules, take this car, it is a 1956 Ford Fairlane convertible, it is built with many different materials, such as steel, rubber and glass are more deep and these materials are made from combinations of elements such as iron, silicon, chromium and carbon, each and every atom that makes up this car was created by our growing Universe.

Physicist Lawrence Krauss studies how the atoms we see on our planet came to be here. We really are part stardust and part dust from the Big Bang, most of the atoms in our body. They are from the cores of stars, but some of them have existed since the first moments of the Big Bang, so we really are cosmic individuals, each and every atom was created over billions of years as our universe evolved, so when we look at this car of course, all the atoms in this car come from stellar explosions, supernova processes, and stellar evolution, but they were created at different times during the evolution of the universe to understand how the universe produced everything. the raw material that we see here on Earth and that we need to take. an incredible journey and a journey back through space and time to the moment our universe was born at the beginning there was nothing, there was no space, there was no time and then there was light, suddenly a small speck of light appears, It was infinitely hot inside this little ball of fire, it was all space this was literally the beginning of time the cosmic clock was ticking time could flow and space could expand in the first moments of the Big Bang if we took it to t equal to 0 everything in our universe everything we can see all the matter and all the The energy of all galaxies was once contained in a region smaller than the size of a single atom.

Today, the idea that our universe was once small originated from the brilliant work of American astronomer Edwin Hubble back in the 1920s. Most astronomers believed that everything visible in the night sky were stars and They were part of our Milky Way galaxy. But Hubble was not convinced. He studied a cloud of swirling light called the Andromeda Nebula NE and showed that it was a Star City, another galaxy far outside our own galaxy. showed that these other galaxies were moving away from ours and the further away they were the faster they seemed to move, the universe was expanding and if the universe was expanding then at some point in the past it must have been small, much smaller and that must have had a beginning the idea of ​​the Big Bang was born theoretical physicist David Spurgle is a big bang expert The Big Bang theory is not really a theory of how the universe began it is actually a theory of how the universe evolved no one knows exactly what happened during the Big Bang, but scientists do know that a fraction of a second after the universe was born, this super hot little fireball was already starting to expand, we don't know how the universe began, so we begin our story when the universe was one billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a minute old quite young the universe was the size of a marble less than one billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe was the size of a marble very unstable and experienced enormous growth During this period of incredibly rapid expansion, space itself was expanding faster than the speed of light, in the same way as this hot glass ball inflates, so did the baby universe expanding in all directions at once, and as it expanded, it cooled by a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillion.

One second after the Big Bang, the universe was small enough to fit inside the palm of your hand. A small fraction of a second later it was the size of Mars. Another fraction of a second and the baby universe had grown to 80 times the size of Earth. a billionth of a second after the big bang and our newborn universe was still expanding but it contained no matter it was pure energy Einstein's famous equation eal mc² proved that mass and energy are interchangeable gave us the knowledge to build weapons of mass destruction It also revealed how the universe created the first matter when a nuclear bomb explodes, a small amount of matter is annihilated and converted into energy in the baby Universe.

The exact opposite happened, it converted pure energy into particles of matter, but there was a problem that created the universe. both matter and its archrival antimatter and when these two met they annihilated each other the childhood universe was a war zone a battle to the death between matter and antimatter if they annihilated each other the universe would remain full of energy without galaxies stars planets In life, fortunately for us, there was an imbalance for every 100 million antiparticles formed, there were 100 million and one particles of matter, but that extra particle of matter remained in each volume and that was enough to account for everything we see in the current universe, This small imbalance led to all the matter we see in the universe, galaxies, stars, planets, even convertibles, and ourselves, astrophysicist Carlos Frank of the University of Durham in England, explained that we are a little bit of Dey that was left behind. the annihilation of matter and antimatter. of that process if the universe had not developed this slight asymmetry between matter and antimatter the universe would have been completely boring there would be no structure there would be no galaxies there would be no planets exactly what this newborn Universe was like has challenged cosmologists since The Big Bang was introduced for the first time now in one of the largest laboratories on Earth.

They are able to recreate conditions that almost certainly existed an instant after the Big Bang. It is called, for short, the Rick Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and is located at Brook Haven National Laboratory. on Long Island it's like a time machine that takes us to 10 millionths of a second after the Big Bang. Here scientists like Todd Satata accelerate subatomic particles close to the speed of light and then smash them into each other. Particles race around this 2 and 1./2 mile circular tunnel in opposite directions 78,000 times per second and then collide inside this giant detector bigger than a three story house when they collide with each other they generate incredible heat just like the real children's Universe.

We believe that the early Universe was extremely hot. billions of times hotter than the center of the Sun and what you're doing when these nuclei crash into each other is melting matter creating matter hot enough to give us an idea of ​​what the early Universe was like when particles collided and broke apart. . Throwing out a shower of even smaller particles is a bit like finding out what cars are made of by watching them crash into each other, you can race two cars together and crash them into each other head on and when you do it a few times you start to see different patterns come out, A tire comes out here, a radiator comes out there and in a short time you can begin to conclude that a racing car is made up of these certain parts.

What Brook Haven scientists have discovered is that a completely new process occurs within these superheated collisions. A form of matter appears and this matter contradicts previous theories about the nature of the early Universe because it is not a gas, it is a liquid, it was super hot, 100 million times hotter than the surface of the Sun, there was so much energy within the universe young that the particles vibrated so fast that it had no stickiness there was no friction and it flowed perfectly this liquid is perfect it has no viscosity in some sense it would be the perfect motor oil except that it is a trillion degrees of heat inside the collider this incredible liquid universe exists For just a small fraction of a second, Brook Haven scientists managed to recreate conditions that existed more than 13 billion years ago.

Although the universe was a perfect liquid, it was chaotic, full of subatomic particles that collided with each other and released more and more energy. There was so much energy that unless particles slowed down, they would never come together and create atoms, the building blocks of matter, and the universe would never create galaxies and stars, not even us. The universe is now one millionth of a second old and has expanded from smaller. that the size of an atom to 8 times the size of the solar system after the incredible upheaval of the first millionth of a second the universe was now relatively calm for the next 3 minutes the expanding Cosmos cooled enough for the protons and neutrons came together and formed the first atomic nuclei hydrogen and helium these were not yet proper atoms they were missing a vital ingredient the electron in the hot baby universe there were many electrons around but there was still so much heat and energy that the electrons were moving too fast to bonds would form and would remain that way for over 300,000 years 380,000 years after the big bang the universe had expanded to the size of the Milky Way had cooled from billions of degrees fah to a few thousand as it cooled the electrons slowed down The universe is now ready to produce its first true elements.

One of the scientists who discovered this critical moment in the history of the universe was Arnold Penus. 1963 Penus, aged 30, and his colleague Robert Wilson, aged 27, began work on a new antenna in New Jersey initially they only studied cosmic radio waves but they would come across one of the greatest discoveries of all time when they began to test their equipment they detected an unexpected background noise, it was an additional signal and it seemed to come from the sky. We very carefully removed the soil, including the solar system, because we did it this winter to summer. Seasonal variation of artificial equipment sources.

All of these things were removed in desperation. The two scientists began to wonder if the strange signal could have a more terrestrial signal. origin they found that there were pigeons perched on the antenna and it was covered with dressings from the Dr. they wondered if the pigeons were the source of the strange signal there was only one solution the droppings and the pigeons would have to leave finally we managed to remove the pigeon droppings, too we had to remove the pigeons, which was a difficult problem because it turned out they wanted to come back and we mailed them somewhere else, but even when the problem pigeons left, the mystery sign wouldn't go away and that's where we were.

I was left with the almost inescapable conclusion that uh this radiation came from the sky. I couldn't explain it. The strange signal detected by Penus and Wilson would turn out to be one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, but the explanation for its mysterious background noise began not with sound but with the

birth

of light. We generally take light for granted, but in the early Universe, 13 billion years ago, we saw nothing at all. The light was trapped. The universe was foggy. Imagine a flashlight beam in a fog. smoke, the light bounces back and forth between the smoke particles and gets trapped in the hot baby universe.

A dense fog of electrons blocks the escape of light, but as the universe continued to expand and cool, the electrons slowed down the protons and then grabbed these calmer electrons to form. complete atoms first of hydrogen and then of helium, the universe was suddenly much less populated with electrons, the fog lifted and the light was no longer trapped, it was launched throughout the Universe creating a burst of blinding light. If we had been there, we would have suddenly seen this opaque Universe. it became transparent suddenly the fog dissipated and we saw a flash of light coming from everywhere around us it must have been a spectacular moment over time this burst of light dimmed and cooled and turned into microwave radiation it was this weak microwave signal 13 billion years old, that penus and Wilson captured in their antenna whatthey heard it was the silent echo of the moment when the universe formed the first atoms it is really the light of the origin of the universe if you have an old FM receiver if you tune between channels turn on the knob and don't capture and jump to a station go to a park there you don't hear that's what we call noise if you have a good radio 1 half of 1% of that is actually the sound of the Big Bang and we can also see the moment when the first elements were created if our television is not tuned into a station a small fraction of the noise is radiation from 13 billion years ago but this radiation is not the only reminder of the

birth

of the universe, including water.

We drink is a moment and it is amazing to think that every time we drink a glass of water we are drinking atoms that have existed since the Big Bang, the hydrogen atoms for the next millions of years, the young universe. continued to expand, cooled and darkened again until now, the universe had only produced hydrogen and helium atoms, but the world we live in is made of more than 100 different types of elements, without them, the universe would still be a very boring place made up only of gas a place where complex matter like planets, cars and people could never develop the universe needed to fuse hydrogen and helium atoms and to do so it needed to form stars the universe was now 200 million years old and billions of light years in temperature had dropped so much that it was colder than liquid nitrogen minus 367 f it was also dark it would have remained a very gloomy place full of gas but without galaxies, stars or planets if it had not been for something, the baby universe was not born perfect Carlos Frank has created an amazing 3D simulation of how the early universe evolved.

He shows that when the universe emerged from the Big Bang, little uneven cracks appeared that were very, very, very small, very, very small and it was this avalanche in front of the baby universe that later developed into the patterns we see today in the galaxies. Without these cracks, the universe would have been a very boring place. The first clues about how these cracks became galaxies and stars emerged when other scientists began examining the Big Bang radiation first discovered by Penus and Wilson. So what Penus and Wilson saw was that this radiation was, as far as they could tell, uniform, which cosmologists then did for the next 25 years.

For years it was hard work trying to find variations, and they found them using W Map, a space probe designed to detect and analyze in detail variations in the microwave background radiation launched in 2001. The $50 million probe was equipped with some of the most sensitive instruments. We have ever been taken to space, our eyes only detect visible starlight, but the W map can tune into invisible microwave radiation. Once in orbit around the sun, it picked up the faint radiation that has been rippling around the universe since the dawn of time, so when we look at the Cosmic Background Radiation we are looking at this radiation that has been flowing toward us for half a million. years after the great man.

Initially, the Microwave Universe looked very boring and seemed to be the same everywhere, but when the map appeared in contrast, the result was spectacular. The baby universe was not smooth or boring at all, it was full of fluctuations, these small fluctuations tell us what the variations in density are, how many things there are and how it varies from place to place, these denser regions will collapse to form clusters. of galaxies and superclusters and the galaxies themselves, these low-density regions will grow and become empty regions between galaxies, so this image really is our connection between the universe when I was a baby, half a million years old, and the universe current, which is 13.7 billion years old.

Tiny imperfections in the incipient Universe would become galaxies and stars, and this is one of the most astonishing propositions in physics: the idea that galaxies like the Milky Way containing 100 million stars once began life as a tiny crack. in the structure of the universe. The material in these cracks was filled with swirling clouds of hydrogen atoms. The voids between the clouds became larger and larger. The gas clouds became denser and hotter. Gravity pulled the gas clouds together into filaments like beads on threads. of a network Cosmic network where giant filaments formed into large globes, stars and galaxies would grow as the universe evolved.

The gases condensed into clouds that collapsed to form stars. The stars sit in a rotating disk that would later become a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way over millions of years. Hydrogen atoms. Clustered and heated, the atoms began to fuse and release energy and the gas clouds began to burn intensely. Finally a star was born in the entire universe. Millions of stars lit up for the first time. The appearance of the first stars would have been a truly spectacular event. If we had been there, we would have actually seen fireworks, enormous individual flashes of light generated as stars are born and extinguished.

The universe has expanded many billions of times its original size. It was filled with newborn stars made of hydrogen and helium. These young stars. They were nothing like our own Sun, they were very unstable, but it was their instability that would make the universe a more interesting place because deep inside each new star something amazing was happening, they were creating new elements. The idea that stars form atoms came from the British astrophysicist. Sir Fred Hil, one of the greatest astronomers of the 20th century, did not believe that the Universe began with a single explosion; in fact, he coined the name Big Bang as a term of derision.

He wanted to know where elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were found. It came from him, he discovered that stars acted like nuclear reactors that worked a bit like a hydrogen bomb in slow motion, but many billions of times more powerful and that their nuclear waste was new elements, but it would be years before the Scientists could confirm their theory by analyzing the light from stars, each element emits light at a particular frequency when heated. Imagine a sodium street lamp. It emits light of a yellow color specific to sodium. The same goes for the stars. Take our sun.

If you break down light into a spectrum, you can see. Lines like a barcode corresponding to the elements. Each element has specific colors that help scientists identify elements like hydrogen, which primarily emits red light. Let's go Home In 1990, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope to unravel some of the mysteries of our early Universe. the space shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope our window to the universe Hubble promised scientists unprecedented views of the young universe: it would be able to look back through space and time and examine the first stars to discover if they were producing new elements , but the dream soon became the worst nightmare after its launch, they discovered that Hubble's mirror was distorted, it saw everything out of focus, it needed corrective lenses and the only way to fix it was to send another space shuttle, one of the repairmen was the astronaut Jeff Hoffman.

We were working on a $2 billion telescope and the last thing we wanted to do was break something and leave it in worse shape than when we first got there. The rescue mission crew had to capture the damaged telescope and then execute a repair mission unprecedented in the world. history of space flight they first had to open the access doors on the side of the telescope. The only thing about working on Hubble that's very different from working on a car is that you look over your shoulder and there you are in space, the Earth is passing by.

Below you, the stars above you, the astronauts had to do painstaking and detailed work in the most difficult conditions, when you work in a spacesuit, your hands are overloaded with thick, rigid gloves, it's like working in ski gloves and it was quite a challenge everything went well until Hoffman tried to close the huge access doors I just had to close the doors and when I went to close them they did not close properly the doors were somewhat warped and took a while to sink This was very serious. If you can't close the doors, you lose the telescope using improvised tools.

Jeff and a colleague were finally able to close the doors. It took the team 5 days to repair the damaged telescope. Cosmologists around the world held their collective breath. They waited to see if the most expensive telescope ever built would deliver what its designers originally promised. I remember well on New Year's Eve December 31, 1993 when my phone rang and it was an old friend who worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Jeff said. Did you have any champagne left over from your party? I told him yes, we still have half a bottle in the refrigerator. He said we'll open it again and have a glass because we got the first photo back and Hubble works.

This is what Hubble saw in the images. They were beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Hubble captured the final moments of a star's life as it explodes and expels gas and dust. It also captured interstellar nurseries of newborn stars that exploded into life billions of years ago and dark pillars of cosmic dust millions and millions of miles long. ready to spawn a new generation of stars and planets I guess it's hard to top the famous Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, where you actually see the birth of stars. I mean, it's almost biblical that there is light and I still get goosebumps.

When I look at it, but Hubble's true moment of glory was yet to come during a 10-day period in 1995, mission controllers pointed the telescope at distant, empty space. What emerged was the image of the Deep Field, a tapestry of distant galaxies that Hubble was looking back in time at some of the first galaxies and stars created, revealing thousands of galaxies that had not been seen before, for which the universe became much richer for our Consciousness after Hubble's Deep Field first showed faint images of galaxies. formed just a billion years after the big bang, scientists examined the light spectrum of these distant stars and showed that these early galaxies had already created elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

Sir Fred Hoy may have been wrong about the birth of the universe, but he was absolutely right about the stars; the first stars acted like giant thermonuclear reactors creating new elements. You can think of creating all the elements in this room as, in a sense, like a car assembly line because on a car assembly line each part is added sequentially. to the vehicle until it is complete Fusion reactions within these young stars released enormous amounts of energy and heat that forced atoms to fuse to form new, heavier elements, one after another, three helium nuclei combined to form carbon two nuclei carbon fused to form magnesium magnesium to form neon and so on over a period of hundreds of thousands of years until silicon fused to form iron.

Iron is a very special atom. The protons and neutrons inside their core are tightly bound together, so even the extreme temperatures inside stars couldn't reach it. to fuse into heavier elements resolutely remains as iron it was the end of the road the element building production line was closed but our universe was not yet complete there were all the ingredients to make a glass of water and some of the elements to build In much of our convertible there were also enough ingredients to make a human being breathe the oxygen we breathe, the calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood, but there were still none of the vital ingredients like chrome for the fender of our car. and some metals like zinc, without which our bodies cannot survive, the universe was about to enter a super creative phase where it produces all the elements heavier than iron to make the missing pieces in our brain puzzle. birth of the universe, it would take some of the most powerful explosions the universe has ever seen our universe has already celebrated its 500 millionth birthday there are still another 13 billion more to go before humans appear on the face of the Earth new giant stars They have created many of the elements of the world we see around us but some vital elements are still missing,heavy metals like chromium and zinc and expensive ones like gold and platinum, to finish the job, the universe conjures up the most surprising phenomena since the Big Bang.

Massive star explosions called supernovas when giant stars that formed the lightest elements ran out of fuel collapsed in on themselves creating incredible amounts of energy and huge explosions these explosions were so powerful that they could fuse elements even heavier than iron and restart element production line Tony metac Kappa of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee believes that without exploding stars, life itself would not exist. Life as we know it would certainly not exist if it were not for the collapse of the core. Supernova events are, very clearly, one of the key links in our chain of origin from the Big Bang to the present day, one of the most recent and largest supernova closest to our galaxy was seen in the southern hemisphere in 1987.

When a supernova like 1987a explodes, it emits light that contains the signatures of the elements it contains. By examining this spectrum of light, scientists can calculate what elements are being forged within the galaxy. Exploding star Michael Smith of Oakridge's experimental astrophysics group then recreates these events inside his own star laboratory in this 100-foot tower. He accelerates and smashes individual particles together like inside a supernova. These subatomic nuclei are the ones that are absolutely crucial in the formation of the heaviest elements, so the idea is to measure exactly how quickly these nuclei will fuse in the laboratory and then translate that information to how quickly they will fuse within the exploding stars.

When particles collide inside the accelerator, they generate enormous energy. In extreme conditions the particles fuse and then you can bring in other particles and they will fuse and we think that an exploding star is perfect for forming elements much heavier than iron that go all the way to the top of the periodic table using the data From these experiments Tony Metapa has created a model of how these exploding massive stars become factories for heavy elements. Massive stars evolve into an onion-like configuration at the end of their lives. They have an iron core and outside the iron core there are layers of successively lighter elements.

Inside the iron core the temperature rises to 8 billion, almost 300 times hotter than the center of the sun. It is so hot that the iron atoms that have sunk into the core of stars break apart, the core destabilizes the nuclei and then collapse. on themselves in a fraction of a second the collapse proceeds to very, very high densities the core collapses at speeds of more than 43,000 m/s a volume the size of the Earth crushes almost six times the size of Manhattan in an instant the core collapses becomes super dense if one were to take 1 cubic cm of that stuff, uh, that would be the size of a sugar cube, that sugar cube would be so dense that it would weigh as much as the entire human race, the core bounces around like a rubber ball compressed and launches a massive shock wave. the shock wave passes through the different skins of the star while passing through the outer layers of the star the energy generated restarts the element production line the atoms break apart to create new heavier elements, all heavier than iron , then the star explodes and the shock wave pushes the shrapnel-like debris out further and further into space, in a very real sense.

Our lives depend on the stars in the universe without their lives and deaths, uh we wouldn't be here today these amazing images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show the consequences of these giant explosions nebulae giant clouds of debris thrown up by the explosion Stars swirling in inside are big new atoms gold silver zinc and lead without supernovas our world would be a very boring and possibly lifeless place, so I'm sure Paris Hilton doesn't wake up every day thinking about this fact, but really if it weren't for the Stars that explode, those 200 million stars that exploded so that we can be here today.

She wouldn't have anything to wear so if it weren't for those supernova explosions there would be no glow. 9 billion years after the big bang and all the ingredients are in place for life as we know it, the universe has grown. In a vast complex place made up of billions of galaxies and countless stars in a quiet corner of the Milky Way Galaxy a mass of dust and gas begins to accumulate, it is filled with the rich debris left over from one of the massive supernovae and when it reaches A critical mass begins to burn intensely A star has been born Our own star The sun What remains forms a disk of swirling debris in orbit around the new star The gas and dust that form this ring The groups of dust collide, attracted by gravity. and the gas becomes larger and larger, the planets form one of these planets, our Earth, over the next 500 million years, our planet slowly generates a protective layer of gas, the atmosphere, the first life appears as individual cells at the beginning, but as the eons pass, those little individual cells evolve.

In plants and animals and eventually in humans we tend to dissociate ourselves from the universe but that, of course, is completely incorrect: we are a vital part of the cosmos and therefore, when we talk about the origin and evolution of the universe, we are actually talking about the The origin and evolution of ourselves, everything we can see on our planet was formed in the Big Bang or inside a star. Scientists like Krauss believe they now know the Genesis of every atom that has created the world we live in. These atoms have been around since the dawn of time and um, when I was young, my mother used to tell me, don't touch, you don't know where it's been and she would have been amazed, but this is not the final chapter of the story after almost 14 billion years old.

The universe has really just begun now we take a journey into the future to see how it all ends. The universe we live in is almost 14 billion years old. It has created the raw materials for everything we see around us. The stars, the planets, the trees, the cities. cars, even us, our world is complete, but the universe is still evolving. Scientists have come up with many theories about how it will end. We know that our universe began with a big explosion. What we still don't know is what the future of our universe will be. Being our universe can end with a bang or a whimper or something even more exotic.

The theory suggests that our universe will run out of steam and stop expanding, every star, galaxy and planet, every atom will begin to collapse and end up in a single superdense point known as the Big Crunch to find out if the universe is really going to crash back down on us. itself, scientists must first find out whether it is still expanding or slowing down. Astrophysics is Saul Pearlmutter studying the death of the universe by finding beacons in space that explode. Stars called type. 1A supernovae, if you have enough exploding stars, these are the supernovae that you have measured, their brightness, the ones that look fainter and fainter must be farther and farther away, so you have some supernovae that a little The brighter they are, the closer some are that are a little fainter, so they are a little further away and others that are very faint, so they are very far away.

Type 1A supernovae are similar to the supernovae that created the heavy ones. elements differ in an important way they always explode with exactly the same brightness this is because they are created in the same way two stars surround each other held together by their gravitational attraction one is wrinkled and super dense shining with white heat a white dwarf The other star has swelled to an enormous size, it is a red giant that is burning the last of its fuel while the two stars orbit each other. The white dwarf sucks gas from its companion and begins to grow year after year when it is exactly 1.44 times its mass of our sun, the white dwarf crumbles, collapses, and then explodes, releasing a blinding burst of energy.

Each type 1A supernova explodes at the same tipping point and are therefore equally bright and visible across the vast distances of the Universe. Pearl murmur needs hundreds of type 1A supernovae. and then measuring how fast they are moving away from us, connects the most powerful telescope on Earth with the most powerful in space using advanced cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope and a giant telescope known officially as the Very Large Telescope, or VT for short. He looks for supernovae once Hubble has detected a particular light source. His colleague Chris Lidman at VT analyzes the object to see what it is made of and makes sure it is a type 1A supernova.

This object is a distant galaxy and next to it is what we believe. is a distant supernova, the next crucial step is to understand what type of supernova it is. The VT decomposes the light from the object into its spectrum. You want to be able to split its light into a spectrum and look for the very characteristic fingerprint that you would see, if it really was a type 1A supernova, the light emitted by this particular supernova reveals that it is a type 1A supernova. Lidman can now calculate how far away this supernova is. The supernova exploded about 7 billion years ago by comparing the positions and dates of all these supernovae spread over space and time Pearl Mutter can calculate if the universe is slowing down its results are a shock the expansion of the universe is not slowing down in absolute when we started the project of course the goal was to find out how much the universe was slowing down now when we actually started looking at the data it looked like the universe wasn't slowing down enough to stop um and in fact it wasn't slowing down much at all and in fact, when we finished the analysis.

It seemed that it was not a period of slowdown, in fact it was accelerating in its expansion. Pearl Mutter's astonishing discovery means that the universe will not stop and then creak back into a pinhead of super-dense matter, but rather, it will continue. to expand faster and faster our universe is literally flying apart the expansion of the universe will accelerate at an ever faster rate until literally everything will be torn apart not only the galaxies but eventually matter the Earth all objects The stars the Earth the planets people atoms in a finite time would tear apart long after our sun has burned out 100 billion years in the future future galaxies will break apart the universe will be made up of isolated stars that are running out of energy some will become In white or brown dwarfs, others will collapse neutron stars or black holes, billions of years after the Big Bang, even black holes will evaporate and all matter will decompose to its basic ingredients, atoms will disintegrate and even protons, the basic components of atoms will disintegrate.

The most likely future is perhaps the most depressing one where the universe becomes cold, dark and empty as the universe continues to expand and galaxies separate from each other, space will become empty and dead, our own group of galaxies will become It will move away from us faster than the speed of light. and it will disappear from the night skies, eventually everything will calm down and that's the end of things, eventually the universe will die and all that will be left will be a cold, dark, lifeless space.