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The Cosmos is a never ending story. It’s a story of birth and death, of love and loss, of hope and despair. It’s a story that weaves its way through the fabric of our lives, connecting us all in a tapestry of experience.
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The Cosmos
The Cosmos is a never ending story. It has been billions of years since the Big Bang and the universe is still expanding. We are discovering new planets and stars every day. The Cosmos is an infinite and mysterious place.
The Milky Way
The Milky Way is our galaxy. It’s a giant spiral of over 200 billion stars, and we’re lucky enough to live right in the middle of it. The sun is just one of those stars, and our solar system is just a tiny speck of dust in the vastness of the Milky Way.
The word “galaxy” actually comes from the Greek word for milk, because to the naked eye, the Milky Way looks like a swath of milk spilling across the sky. In reality, it’s an immense collection of gas, dust, and stars held together by gravity.
And it’s not just one big blob. The Milky Way is actually two galaxies that are merging together. We live in what’s called the “disk”—a flat plane where most of the action happens. But there’s also a giant spherical halo around it that contains very old stars, and a bunch of globular clusters—tightly packed balls of even older stars.
The disk is about 100,000 light-years across, and about 1,000 light-years thick. It’s divided into four main regions:
-The bulge: This is the dense hub of activity at the very center of the disk.
-The spiral arms: These are long tendrils made up of gas, dust, and young stars that wind outward from the bulge. We live in one called the Orion Spur.
-The disk: This is where most of the galaxies 200 billion stars reside—including our sun.
-The halo: This spherical region surrounds everything else and contains some of the oldest stars in our galaxy.
The Solar System
The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system consisting of the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of the objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest eight are the planets, with the remainder being significantly smaller objects, such as dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies. Of the objects that orbit indirectly—the moons—two are larger than the smallest planet, Mercury.
The vast majority of the system’s mass is in the Sun, with most of the remaining mass contained in Jupiter. The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, are terrestrial planets, being primarily composed of rock and metal. The four outer planets are giant planets, being substantially moremassive than the terrestrials. The two largest giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, are gas giants, being composed mainly of hydrogen and helium; the two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, are ice giants, being composed mostly of substances with relatively high melting points compared to hydrogen and helium, called volatiles—such as water (H2O), ammonia (NH3), methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2)—which exist as ices or gases in those conditions. All eight planets have almost circular orbits that lie within a nearly flat disc called ecliptic plane.
Solar System is estimated to be at least 4.6 billion years old. The relative position of objects in space remains relatively constant over time but their alignment changes due to planetary precession caused by a slight wobble in Earth’s axis as it rotates about its polar axis every 25800 years.[1] Nevertheless precise dates can be calculated back to at least four billion BC when all body orbits were believed to lie close to a single plane through Earth’s center
What would happen if our solar system had five instead of eight planets?
If our solar system had five instead of eight plants, it is likely that life would not exist as we know it. The solar system would be missing key components necessary for sustaining life.
Beyond the Solar System
The further one looks into the cosmos, the more one sees. Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field image, captured in 2003 and 2004, is the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light. It offers a glimpse into a time when the first galaxies were forming.
This field of view is just a tiny sliver of the sky, about one ten-millionth of the total area. In this single image, Hubble reveals approximately 10,000 galaxies — some of them extremely faint and very far away. Many of these are young galaxies that looked very different in their formative years compared to how they appear today.
The Origin of the Cosmos
The Cosmos is an unimaginably large and old place. How did it all come to be? The answer to that question has been the subject of intense debate and speculation for centuries. Some say that the Cosmos is eternal and has always existed. Others say that it was created by a god or gods. Still others say that it came into being spontaneously, without any cause.
The Big Bang Theory
The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the observed universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution. The model describes how the universe expanded from a very high-density and high-temperature state, and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure.
The Steady State Theory
The steady state theory is a scientific hypothesis which states that the universe is in a constant state of expansion, with the matter density remaining unchanged over time. This is in contrast to the Big Bang theory, which states that the universe was created in a one-time event and has been expanding ever since.
The steady state theory was first proposed by Fred Hoyle in 1948, and further developed by Indian astrophysicistuthar Chandrasekhar and Austrian physicist Hermann Bondi. Hoyle (1915–1997) was an English astronomer who did much to develop our understanding of nuclear reactions in stars, and was knighted for his work. Chandrasekhar (1910–1995) was an Indian astrophysicist who spent most of his career in the United States, and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983. Bondi (1919–2005) was an Austrian-British astrophysicist who also made significant contributions to cosmology.
The key idea of the steady state theory is that the universe is not changing with time, at least on large scales. This means that new matter is being created as fast as old matter is being used up, so that the overall density of matter remains constant. This would explain why we see no evidence of a Big Bang – if matter has always been present then there would be no reason for it all to have started from a single point at a specific time in the past.
The steady state theory was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but fell out of favour when it became clear that the universe does indeed appear to be expanding. In 1965, American astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered evidence of this expansion in the form of microwave radiation coming from all directions of the sky. This discovery, known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), provided strong support for the Big Bang theory and effectively killed off any serious scientific interest in the steady state theory.
The Future of the Cosmos
The Cosmos is an infinite and ever-expanding universe. It is filled with billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Our sun is just one of these stars. The Cosmos is always expanding and will continue to do so forever.
The End of the Universe
What will happen to the Universe in the far future is a matter of much speculation. Currently, it is not known how long the Universe will last for, as this depends on properties of matter and energy that are not yet fully understood.
One possibility is that the Universe will continue expanding forever. In this case, it will become increasingly cold and dark as galaxies move away from each other. Eventually, all stars will exhaust their fuel and die, leaving behind only black holes.
Another possibility is that the Universe will reach a point where it starts to contract again. In this case, it would become incredibly hot and dense, ending in a ‘Big Crunch’.
A third possibility is that the Universe will reach a state of ‘maximum entropy’, where it is so spread out that energy can no longer be used to do work. This would also be the end of the Universe as we know it.
Which of these scenarios actually happens (if any) is currently unknown. However, there is evidence that suggests that the Universe might be infinite, meaning that every one of these scenarios could be happening somewhere in the Cosmos!
The Big Crunch Theory
The Big Crunch theory is one of the proposed endings for the universe. In this scenario, the universe continues to expand but eventually reaches a point where gravity pulls all matter back together, resulting in a huge collapse. Ultimately, all matter in the universe would be compressed into a single point, known as a singularity. One potential outcome of the Big Crunch is that it could kickstart a new Big Bang, resulting in another universe.
The Big Rip Theory
The Big Rip Theory posits that the ultimate fate of the cosmos is determined by the nature of dark energy. If dark energy stays constant, then it will slowly tear galaxies, stars, and eventually atoms apart. If, on the other hand, dark energy increases over time, it will rip the universe apart at an ever-accelerating rate. Eventually, all matter in the cosmos will be stretched so thin that it will effectively disappear. At this point, time will also come to an end, since there will be nothing left to measure its passage. According to this theory, then, the end of the universe will be marked by a “big rip” in which all matter is destroyed.
