OBJECTIVE:  I will be able to characterize the current state of the Universe during today's class.

CALENDAR: Solar System Retakes Thursday (10/3) and Friday (10/4) at 6:30 am here.

WORDS FOR TODAY:

Let's take a gander and see how we're doing with our words O' the Day:

• 10^-43 sec: Planck Time- The farthest back in time we think we'll *ever* be able to describe with science & math
• 10^-32 sec: Inflation- The Universe expands *suddenly* faster than the speed of light.
• 10^-6 sec: First particles (electrons!)
• 3 min: Still too hot for light (Dark Time!)
• 300,000 years: The Universe cools off enough for electrons to get captured to form complete hydrogen and helium atoms.
• 1 Billion years: Stars & Galaxies Form
• Current Era (13.7 billion years After Big Bang)
• Big Bang
• Strong Force (inside protons!)
• Weak Force (not actually a force and very complicated. We will ignore this)
• EM Force (electromagnetic force. Keeps electrons orbiting an atom's nucleus)
• Gravity (the weakest of all the four forces)
• Big Freeze | Hyperbolic (saddle) | Open | >10¹⁰⁰ years
• Modified Big Freeze | Disk | Open | ~10¹⁰⁰ years
• Big Crunch | Sphere (round) | Closed | ~100 billion years
• Big Rip | Sphere (round) | Closed | ~10²⁰ years

WORK O' THE DAY: 

Did you check the calendar?

Let's check our observing schedule HERE

Speaking of which, we had a very good viewing last night. Several folks (and a parent, YAY!) and a former student of mine came by and we got 46 minutes of images for the Cocoon Nebula. We should have had 66 minutes but we (and by "we" I really mean "me") *ahem* forgot to restart the camera after pausing it and then my laptop died. AAARGHHH.

Gotta add 'check the power supply' to the check list!

Let's get some reviews from those who attended

Let's go HERE and then navigate to our new student data page.

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Needless to say I was VERY pleasantly surprised by how quickly and how well everyone took to using the rig and we got some excellent pix.

The team will take a few more turns at getting used to the gear and we will start our *official* observations towards the end of the month when we have longer nights.

We will start setting up right around sunset, currently 7:00 and start taking data roughly an hour later.

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Back to the current Universe.

Let's take a gander at our formative and especially the data page HERE from last yesterday. Let's see if we can shore up particular areas where we are a bit weak. Also, several people appear to have not submitted their formatives. Ack!

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Here are a few additional questions that students sometime pose about the Big Bang:

1) What other theories are there currently that might not be as popular as the Big Bang but are still being investigated by astronomers?

That is a great question and one that students often ask and the answer can be a little bit unsatisfying:

There is currently no other scientific theory that is being investigated by astronomers. Here's why:

Back in the 1930's Edwin Hubble (Yup, he of the "Hubble Telescope" fame) put a spectrometer on a telescope and pretty quickly realized that the more distant objects he looked at were all moving away from us. That set about quite the turmoil in science as the dominant theory was the "Steady State Theory" which suggested that Universe is, was and will always be in the same state as it is now.

In order to get General Relativity to work with the Universe on the grand scale of things, Einstein added a "Cosmological Constant" to his equations to ensure that his mathematical model of the Universe stayed in that "Steady State".

He later called that his most profound blunder.

SIDENOTE: I believe (please check me on this) that Einstein's "Cosmological Constant" fits very nicely with our current addition of "Dark Energy" to our models which is kind of profound.

The End of the Steady State Theory: In the 1950's, the last advocate for the Steady State Theory was Fred Hoyle who very dismissive ly labeled the current theory "The Big Bang" in the hopes that it would discourage people from adopting it. The discovery of CMBR in 1963 put an end to the "Steady State Theory."

Final Note: Please keep in mind this isn't just me picking favorites here. There really and truly is no other theory in astronomy that is being currently investigated by astronomers. In some ways it might be helpful if there was since we are getting really and truly stumped by some aspects of the Big Bang Theory that have result in:

• An accelerating (as opposed to expanding) Universe
• Dark Energy (a kind of silly name used as a placeholder for the unknown force that is pushing the Universe to accelerate outwards)
• Dark Matter (a better term in that it involves a similar but still very different phenomenon-- the fact that when we measure the mass of galaxies by their gravitational interactions it just doesn't work out. There is a "missing mass" problem)

2) How does the science of the Big Bang work with various religions?

I know in this age we tend to shy away from talking about science and religion at the same time but instead I offer the following thoughts:

There are certainly dozens and even hundreds of religions practiced by people all over the word, including (in alphabetic order) Buddhist, Christian, Confucism, Hindu, Islam, Judaism, Shinto, Sikhism.

I'm afraid I know very little on the creation aspects of those religions and it is beyond the scope of this class to delve into comparative religion.

Having said that, I do know that much of modern astronomy owes it's foundations to work done by Islamic scholars in the so called "Golden Age" of Islamic scholarship from the 8th through the 13th centuries. In fact, many of the stars that we view every night have Arabic names such as Aldeberan (literally "eye of the bull") which is the brightest (and red) star in the constellation Taurus, the bull.

I also know that the Catholic Church has been at the forefront of astronomy for the last 150 or so years. It might interest you to know that one of the first proponents of the Big Bang was a Belgian Catholic priest named Georges Lemaître. Wikipedia describes his background as "Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain." He published a paper in 1927 that was the first academic paper written proposing the Big Bang Theory:

"Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant, rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques" ("A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius, Accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extragalactic Nebulae").

Keep in mind that the term Big Bang wasn't used (derisively at first) until the 1950's.

Additionally the Vatican Observatory has been at the forefront of astronomical research for centuries.

My understanding is that the moment of creation in many faiths has a sudden and dynamic beginning that many people of faith ascribe to the Big Bang.

Finally, I took a "Special Relativity" course in college from a very dynamic math professor who had substantial interests in Math, Quantum Physics and Philosophy. I still remember him asking us a pointed question on some deep aspect of relativity -- that stumped us all:

He practically shouted "ZEN Buddhism, this is ZEN Buddhism".

3) Additional questions, comments, concerns???