How old is the Universe?   

 Guess!

     The intelligible Universe we live in, was formed 13.7 billion years ago. It was developed in a process we call, “the Big Bang”. A singularity exploded (that’s a guess because quantum mechanics can’t work in a singularity) to create energy, atoms, mass, light, Time and Space.

 To get a visual understanding of this process, pay attention to the TIME after the Big Bang when each Epoch occurred. 

THE BIG BANG THEORY – AN ILLUSTRATED TIMELINE

For 350,000 thousand years after the Big Bang, there was no light emitted, because their was too much energy for photons to escape. 

     This Universe we live in has gravity bending the time and space. The Universe seems to be expanding and the expansion seems to be increasing at the edge of the intelligible Universe.. 

     This leads astrophysicists to believe that there is dark matter and dark energy  in the universe, helping the rate 0f expansion to increase at the edge of the observable Universe. 

       There are billions of dollars invested in laboritories looking for information in the Cosmic Background Data and the XRAY Radiation data that can help us solve whether Dark Matter and Dark Energy exist. 

    The STANDARD IDEA is that so much DARK ENERGY exists, that it is 70% of the Universe; and so much DARK MATTER exists, that it forms 25% of the  Universe and NORMAL MATTER is only 5% of the Universe, but we can’t SEE it.

     There are some astrophysicists, who do not accept the requirements to look for and find: DE and DM. They believe Newtonian physics should be adjusted for accelerations at large radiuses, as Planck did, when he introduced quantum mechanics and as Einstein did, when he introduced his Theory of Relativity. Personally, I side with this group of physicists. 

     This group propose a Modification to Newtonian Dynamics, MOND. This proposes an insertion of:

 α0 =  (speed of light) squared /by the radius of the Universe. 

     You can read about this MOND at NAUTILIS/ cosmos.

     That the Universe is intelligible is a problem that can not be easily explained. Some people reach out to God and others simply can’t explain it. 

       But, if we study the philosophy of the Ancient Greeks, we will discover that the pre Socratic philosophers believed that the world was reasonable and open to study, by reasonable minds. 

    Too often, the development of rational scientific discovery has been stymied by religious ideas that would not accept rational discoveries.

We have created the LIGO. 

             Through the use of this Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave instrument we have heard the sounds of gravity in action.

Where do we live in the Universe?

          We live in a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.            

How many galaxies exist in our Universe? 

The Milky Way is one of over a billion galaxies. 

How old is the Milky Way Galaxy?  

          It is about 13.5 BYA. It developed shortly after the Big Bang. 

An image across 50,000 light years of of the Milky Way         

Shows:                           

              — the earliest stars in our galaxy colored in red and

              — stars formed later colored in blue.                     

The Solar System          

           Eight planets travel around our Sun, one star of a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy.            (7)

When was our Solar System born?

            We estimate the Solar System to be 4.67 Billion years old. It formed from the solar nebular, from an exploded earlier star, that spun out to a huge disk. This nebula lasted about 2 million years, and it’s center formed into our Sun and the planets formed around it. 

Planet EARTH 

This is the first image of our Earth.  It is called “Earthrise”. It was taken on the Apollo 8 mission, that circled the Moon ten times. This was taken on the 24^th of December, 1968. 

Age of the Earth

We estimate the Earth formed by 4.5 BYA. 

So, we have eight planets circling our sun and we have physics and chemistry.