Notes 1.1
to 380,000 years – the universe
Origins of the Universe and Solar System
Non-scientific Thought
• Ancient Egyptians believed in many gods and myths
which narrate that the world arose from an infinite sea at
the first rising of the sun.
• The monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam claim that a supreme being created the universe,
including man and other living organisms.
Steady State Theory
- proposed by Hoyle and colleagues in 1940
- believed that the universe has always been and
will always be the same
- it was based on the idea that the universe is
uniform in space and has unchanging time
- new matter is created as the universe expands
thereby maintaining its density
Big bang Theory
- event that happened about 13.8 billion years ago
- it postulates that the universe started from a hot,
dense state, a singularity, that has undergone
inflation
- this idea started in 1927 when Georges Lemaitre
suggested an expanding universe that began from
a single primordial particle and named his idea
“hypothesis of a primeval atom” or “Cosmic Egg”
 Edwin Hubble
o Hubble’s Law – “redshift distance law of
galaxies”, light undergoes redshifts if the
source is moving away from the observer.
Light waves are stretched and wavelength
becomes larger and appears to be reddish.
o Hubble’s constant – calculation that other
galaxies are moving away from the milky way
at a speed directly proportional to their
distance from it
Evolution of the Universe according to the Big Bang
Theory
a. Time zero (13.8 billion years ago) – the universe
was a hot, dense particle containing all matter and
energy
b. From 10-43 to 10-32 second – it underwent very
rapid and exponential inflation
c. From 10-32 until the 10th second – conditions
allowed the existence of only fundamental
particles (quarks),and subatomic particles (hadrons
and leptons).
d. From 10 sec. to 20 min. – quarks, hadrons and
leptons fused to create protons, neutrons and
atomic nuclei, forming H, He and Li by
nucleosythesis. At the 20th minute, sufficient
cooling did not allow further nucleosynthesis.
e. From 20 min.
continued cooling and photons separated from
matter. These photons could travel freely and are
detected today as cosmic background radiation.
f. After 380,000 years – the universe continued to
cool down, matter collected into nebulae (clouds)
giving rise to stars
g. After 100 million years – galaxies would form,
through nucleosynthesis in stars, C and heavier
elements were produced
h. At about 9.8 billion years – the solar system was
formed. From 9.8 billion years to present , the
universe became dark-energy dominated and it
undergoes accelerating expansion
Solar System
- located in the Milky Way galaxy – a huge disc- and
spiral-shaped aggregation of about at least 100
billion stars and other bodies
Origins of the Solar system
Nebular Theory
- In the 1700s Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel
Kant, and Pierre-Simon Laplace independently
thought of a rotating gaseous cloud that cools and
contracts in the middle to form the sun and the
rest into a disc that become the planets
Encounter Hypothesis
- states that the sun encountered a rogue star. Upon
the encounter, hot gas was removed from both
stars due to their gravitational interaction. The hot
gas then accumulated and formed the planets
where the rogue star, being less dense, formed the
outer planets and the sun formed the inner planets
Protoplanet Hypothesis
- suggests that a large cloud of gas and dust rotated
slowly. Then, either because of its own gravity or
by the explosion of a star, the cloud gas and dust
began to collapse decreasing the size of the cloud
of gas and dust resulting to an increase rotation.
The compression made the interior so hot creating
H fusion and thus creating the Sun. Surrounding
the Sun was a great plate-like disk containing
whirlpools or eddies that shrank into compact
masses forming the protoplanets that later
become planets and moons.