Wolfgang Korsus Dipl.-Ing.NT, Astrophysiker
Klingenberg 40
D-25451 Quickborn
Mobil 01625680456 FNetz 0410669295
Website : wolfgang.korsus.net
I’m trying.
I’ll look in the history books. See, the word „astronomy“ keeps popping up. I conclude from this that it must be a very old, let’s say much used, old, established science. Does it have something to do with infinity? ………I do not see that yet.
An encyclopedia helps me. It says that astronomy has the reputation to be one of the oldest sciences of mankind.
Over 5000 years ago, the Babylonians were observing the sky with their eyes only. They didn’t have telescopes yet. In the course of the millennia several peoples followed, in which there were people who at that time only watched the sky with their eyes.
……and their comprehensible, recorded results can be seen. As an example I will mention a few names without going into their achievements: Aristarchus of Samos, Galileo Galilei, Copernicus, Newton, and so on and so forth.
Astronomy of the ancient world, do you have any idea what is meant by that ! The astronomy developed in ancient Greece is on the one hand the basis of today’s celestial science, on the other hand it represents the beginning of natural science in general.
Although it is based on the ideas and data of the astronomy of Mesopotania, it goes far beyond it by a real scientific interpretation of the celestial phenomena and the development of special measuring instruments.
Direct sources of the ancient astronomers are few and far between, but many works are cited in the writings of Greek natural philosophers, while others have been preserved by means of translations into Arabic.
Today, astronomy is bursting with modern telescopes with which it can look ~ over 14 billion light years far into space and astrophysics is happy to help with this, it is then also fundamentally necessary.
Long „preface“, short sense – let us start and throw the first glance into the universe –
If we focus during our lifetime only on what is happening on the small planet, then we miss and forget what is happening up there above us every day.
There is also a lot to see above our heads and by that I mean mainly research. Even without a telescope, i.e. with the naked eye, we humans can look far into space to a limited extent. And on this, I call it „simple astronomy“, generations of astronomers had to rely on. Of course, mathematics has always been part of everything, running parallel to it.
I like to cut the Ptolemaic world view (the astronomer, mathematician and Phil. C. Ptolemy) has designed it. He was really convinced by his findings that the planet Earth would be in the center of „space“. Likewise, all the other planets (or rather – celestial bodies) also rotated around this earth.
Meanwhile, well-known astronomers have proved by their research results, and found, so please do not!
We move……the planet earth around the sun ! Basta !
In the last decades it has brought until today, by the measurement and observation with technically nearly matured material (software) and devices highly qualified results. The Hubble Space Telescope and other technical novelties extend the „foresight“ into the universe more and more.
I like to point out the year 2024 ! Then there is something amazing……to look into our universe. I will contact my readers in time !
A few „close“ examples :
Our only moon is a known celestial body (besides the earth of course). It was also entered by humans; once. Now a little more detailed:
It is much smaller than our planet. The diameter is indicated with 3.760 km. In contrast, our earth has a diameter of 12700 km and its circumference is given as 40,000 km. How far away is it? At some times it seems to me huge, then again very far away….
It orbits the earth in no exact circle, resulting in a back and forth movement. Nearby, it’s 356,410 km and further away, 406,740 km. The mean value of the distance is thus calculated at 384,403 km.
For many calculations we assume a general average of 400,000 km. The value leads to a light second (approximately).
Our earth-moon is about 400.000 km away from earth – about one light-second:
So let’s go over it again. From moon to earth, light needs little bit more than one second. …….We now come to other things that are again visible to the naked eye, namely, casually said, 3,000 stars that are reflected in about 88 constellations.
We see the more stars the less light pollution there is……….light pollution? – Light radiating from street lamps, billboards and other artificial light sources into the night sky. By the way……the bigger the cities or metropolises on this small planet, the more light pollution !!
From this you can conclude that the darker it is around us, the more stars we see. Among them is the double star „Alpha Centauri“, it is four light years away from us……..very faint 40 trillion kilometers.
And finally the most distant „part“ that can be seen without any aids, it is the Andromeda galaxy – distance 2.5 million light years.
So, and now to the telescope. With such an optical device you can look even deeper into the universe.
With a telescope you can look much deeper into the universe and we discover for example the globular star cluster M 87 which is only very faintly shining.
Extraordinarily interesting is the Atacama Desert in Chile, that is the „little place“ on this world, that is simply closer to the stars than others. In the Atacama Desert, the European Southern Observatory operates the most sophisticated telescope on earth and also implements the world’s largest stargazer project. (Approx. 3200 m to 5176 m high)
As for telescopes, one more mention:
It has the largest telescopes in the world. Everything is controlled by remote control and you look deeper into space than through any other telescope on Earth.
To mention is the Carina Nebula (..and the Sombrero Galaxy. And you can also see the Antenna Galaxy.)…-Naturally it takes a little while, about 75 million years, until this light arrives on earth.
But what there is to notice absolutely and never forget it !!!
The human being with his idiotic urge is necessarily to see many times !!!!! to multiply. Because by each person more on this planet more CO² is produced. This happens simply by all his actions during his lifetime.
Everything increases, our dirty earth atmosphere, the light pollution and the constantly existing air turbulences, they affect the general photographs of many earthbound telescopes.
But, as many of you know, space telescopes already exist and they do not need to swallow the impairments listed above. I like to point out the Hubble Space Telescope, it takes pictures with extremely long exposure times, and is therefore excellent. The results it has achieved so far are outstanding for the related sciences. Let’s say it very simply, it is the „furthest“ thing the observer has ever seen.
It’s called the „Ultra Deep Field“ – it’s countless galaxies from the primeval times of the universe, i.e. about 13 billion light years away from the planet“ Earth“.
Who may think now, oh yes, we have already discovered a lot, is extremely mistaken. The still existing largest part of the universe, lies for a long, long time still to explore, before us.
Let’s start out very slowly and rested !
The Big Bang
The start or beginning of the universe ……………………….
It is a good and worth knowing 13.7 billion years ago, when space and time were created. So this already mentioned „Big Bang“ is the everywhere mentioned start of the universe. It is quite precisely the beginning of the universe, a theory on the part of physicists.
A quite decisive question now comes up to the previous statement: ……..but why did the universe come into being at all? …..we do not know until today!
What exactly happened at the big bang is theory !
Then I will contribute a little bit more to the topic. I call the beginning of the universe the beginning of the scientific history of the universe.
So once again quite trivially the questions listed which almost everyone would ask himself who deals with this topic.
- What happened at the big bang,
- what was before the big bang and
- where did the big bang happen?
I don’t understand:
There is no „before“ the big bang, nor is there any space where the big bang could have taken place. Space and time only came into being with the „big bang“.
It is a long way from the first astronomical observations to the proof of the Big Bang! This path leads via daring theories, mathematical proofs and a coincidence to the final theory. The universe final state 13.7 billion years ago. It was created from ( „flawless“ energy within fractions of a second) …..all matter, of course by the Big Bang. The resulting explosive motion continues:
The universe continues to expand.
Beginnings of astronomy
How or who discovered the Big Bang !
…..we start extremely slowly
First of all I would like to mention a very respectable person:
Edwin Hubble
His approach and discovery has virtually revolutionized the astronomical world view:
Through his groundbreaking discoveries, the science of the time recognized that the cosmos was filled with uncountable, i.e. countless galaxies. These galaxies are moving away from each other like fragments of a gigantic explosion.
With this statement and the gigantic discovery in the twenties and thirties of this century, Edwin Powell Hubble changed the scientific conception of the world more radically and therefore more comprehensible than any other astronomer since the Renaissance…….and even a little bit further back !
Before that, and it must be mentioned, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (1564 to 1642) almost burned his fingers when he finally banished the Earth from the center of the solar system. Now you ask yourselves, what caused the burning?
It was once again the „Catholic Church“, which he could barely escape, but he couldn’t help himself from the sentence „And it does move“. (1633)
In short, since then a bag of researchers have contributed to these truly revolutionary discoveries, but in my opinion it was Hubble who, with his passionate dedication to work, his extremely sharp mind and with the most argumentative skill, drew his conclusions !!!!!
…..and which scientist with outstanding creative talent and intellectual power I do not want to forget… Albert Einstein
The scientific bang effect for the development of the Big Bang theory is of course represented by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity from 1915. It says very clearly that space can deform, i.e. also shrink or grow.
Gravity is the result of this, and with it large masses are attracted.
Applied to the universe, this meant that the mutual attraction of all matter would eventually cause the universe to collapse. But this idea was even Einstein, after he was an advocate of the Steady State Theory, very suspicious, so that he extended his formula by a constant. The cosmological constant (usually abbreviated by the great Greek lambda Λ , it is a physical constant in Albert Einstein’s equations of general relativity, which describes the gravitational force as the geometric curvature of space-time.
It acted as a counterforce against the total collapse. Other researchers also continued to work on this hypothesis of a dynamic space: Alexander Friedmann is worth mentioning, and a while later George Lemaître, who was the first researcher to postulate the Big Bang in 1927. That is….. (assume unproven as given)
George Lemaître’s idea of the big bang ………
Lemaître’s idea was as simple as it was ingenious: if Einstein’s expanding universe is constantly expanding, matter must have been highly compressed in the past. If you think back far enough, you reach the point where everything must have been compressed to the size of an atom: the birth of the universe. His article, published in 1927, was hardly noticed by the experts. There was no proof to support his theoretical considerations.
The Hubble constant as an indication of Lemaître’s idea
Edwin Hubble, had succeeded in 1923 to calculate the distance of the Andromeda Nebula, and so he continued during the next years. As a result, he was gallant in proving that almost all galaxies are moving away from our solar system…mathematically speaking, proportionally. Which says nothing other than the following, the further away a galaxy is, the greater the speed at which it is moving away.
But there is still the Hubble constant and this is recognized by George Lemaîtres as a missing piece of evidence for his big bang hypothesis. This scientific finding is quite simply confirmation of the drifting apart of the universe. You could also call it the proof.
As early as 1931, Einstein, too, was convinced of the proof after a little waiting time, and thus officially switched to the side of the proponents of the big bang theory. For the sake of completeness I would like to point out the Hubble constant :
The Hubble constant H 0 is a fundamental quantity of cosmology, which indicates the expansion speed of the universe in [ k m s – 1 M p c – 1 ] (1 Mpc, Megaparsec = 10 6 Parsec = 3.2615-10 6 light years).
Before I go into more detail about the so-called big bang, I must point out something very important, in general it is a sign from which it is very likely that a development, a fact, a situation or a state can be deduced……. The microwave radiation
….it’s the last overwhelming evidence of the Big Bang, also known as the Big Bang in the English-speaking world. What sounds slightly surprising is that it was discovered quite by accident. It was in 1963 when physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a strange noise in their research on radio waves.
They were looking for a defect during their research. All instruments and working devices were checked……but without being able to locate or exclude the strange noise.
A little later, about a year later, they made new measurements, confirming what they had already suspected at that time.
The background noise that had hindered their work at that time had been nothing more than the echo of what was probably the most powerful explosion of all time:
……of the Big Bang…
I’ll try to put this as fucking simply as I can:
What we can perceive in the universe today, that is, what exists in the universe today, that was once compressed into a tiny point. After the period of a whole second !!!!!! …..and I write it extra with many exclamation marks, the universe had expanded to a diameter as large as the distance from the earth to the moon.
Perhaps a more incomprehensible example…..all the matter that makes up our Milky Way fit into a coffee cup, for example. I come back to the period of one second, – in a fraction of a second it became trillions of trillions of times larger. The matter was dispersed throughout space. Then the universe grew slower again – and it has been cooling down ever since. In its early phase, the universe was a „primordial soup“ of particles and energy. Slight density fluctuations and the expansion of the universe then led to the formation of matter structures
So here’s the question….
How do we know that? The first radiation of the universe – the so-called background radiation (microwave radiation) – can be measured and radiation maps of the young universe can be calculated.
The maps to be found are colourful. Because the different colours to be found there stand for the differences in temperature. They show that slightly different temperatures prevailed in the universe, i.e. that it was not equally hot everywhere in the universe.
When the universe had expanded further, matter there could clump together under the influence of gravity and galaxies could form.
The Big Bang – step by step
I have chosen the written „step by step“ because the observation basically explains the time values and the temperature values at the Big Bang in a decisive way.
But as a precautionary measure, it should be noted that some processes took billions of years, while others happened in a fraction of a second. A short clarifying comment on the powers of ten :
- 10⁰ seconds is then equal to one second.
- 10¹ seconds are 10 seconds.
- 10² are 100 seconds and immediately
Correspondingly:
- tenths of a second for a tenth of a second,
-10 ˉ ² for a hundredth of a second, etc.
In total, the time from the Big Bang until today 10⁶¹ comprises powers of ten. ( Let that sink in….. )
A very private remark, even as a physicist it is difficult to get used to the ten-potency game. But getting used to it doesn’t count, here it’s about reckoning with it and interpreting the highly interesting history of the Big Bang accordingly without mistakes. Here we go….