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Scientific American has lately (by 10-10-2008) been wondering again about The Big Bang. The loop quantum gravity theory - which marries quantum theory with general relativity, predicted the existence of "space-time atoms". Which would have implications for the origins of the universe. Among them, an implication that The Big Bang was a bounce-back from a pre-existing universe. It's endless isn't it; how did that pre-existent universe begin? In a similar way to the one before it? Maybe the Ancient Hindus were right about the universe, it's turtles all the way down!
Albert Einstein said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science... to know that what is impenetrable to our senses really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness."
Now we know the "colours" of space: Space is not black, as we might have thought, but "an elegant shade of pale green", as researchers have found from studying light emitted by 200,000 galaxies. The colour is vaguely between turquoise and aquamarine. Research has been conducted by Dr. Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. They suggest the universe started with a "blue period", now to green, and will move on to a red period. (Reported by 12 February 2002) But Oops, by 9 March 2002, this has to be corrected by astronomers. Due to a computer glitch, the colour of the universe is not "pale green" at all, but "off-white, not quite beige". Apologising here is Terry Bridges, a member of the Anglo-Australian Observatory Team. Evidently, a computer program pondering all this had a rogue "red shift" in it.
Venus: Average surface temperature of Venus is 480 degrees centigrade.
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Mars was once wetter than Earth, is the finding of a new examination of Mars' atmosphere. Millions of years ago it had oceans a kilometre deep (?) (Reported 3 December 2001. See a recent (2002) issue of Science with an article by Donald Hunten of University of Arizona.)
20 million years ago: Cetaceans with large brains (including dolphins) appear on Earth.
37 million years ago: Antarctica on Earth begins to freeze.
Prior to this, the area had rainforests on coastal plains, rather
like today's Central Tasmanian Highlands. An earlier date might be 34
million years ago. A researcher is University of Tasmania research
professor, Pat Quilty. Project, an Ocean Drilling Program. (Reported
3 June 2000)
Note: "Two American space scientists propose
that spectacular geophysical changes occur every 33 million years or
so as our solar system passes through clouds of dark matter. These
clouds upset comets, comet storms arise, a 600-million-year record
indicates long periods of geological inactivity short bursts of
violent change, and the earth with each 34 million years changes its
magnetic field; our sun laps our own galaxy each 250 million years."
(From an Australian newspaper, 2 February 1985)
40 million years ago: Appearance of a primate differentiation - Anthropoidea - monkeys.
50 million years ago: Early Cetaceans appear.
53 million years ago, approx: Gondwanaland continents to split from other land masses. The last land bridge between Australia and another continent sinks into the sea. Antarctica slowly moves south, Australia moves north.
64 million years ago: Mesozoic-Cenozoic Extinction, perhaps due to
comet or asteroid impact. Extinction of the dinosaurs/other
megafauna. Major impact may be at Yucatan, Mexico, with lesser
impacts at Iowa, USA, Siberia and China. Possibly Deccan lava flows
in India.
For more, see a website from Tony Smith at:
http://www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/Hist.html -
64 million years ago: Reference item: Robert Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and their Extinction. New York, Zebra Books, 1986.
65 million years ago: Even newer work (reported March 2010) reinforces views that 12km was the width of an asteroid that struck the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, hitting with the force of a billion Hiroshima bombs, wiping out 50 percent of life on earth, including the dinosaurs. Various theories that the dinosaurs were wiped out by multiple asteroid hits have been further discounted.
65 million years ago: New evidence has emerged about a comet
strike which 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs. The new
evidence is the work of a team of scientists at the New Zealand
government's Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, who have
examined an exposed coal seam in a stream bank adjacent to a coal
mine north of Greymouth on the South Island. Commenting on their
research in a recent issue of Science is Dr. Tim Flannery. The
coal mine is about "as far from the site of the comet strike"
as it is possible to be, yet the destruction about New Zealand was
awesome. Material from the comet - iridium - was found in the coal
seam, first re-inspected by Dr Ian Raine, indicating that the comet
strike had thrown material high into the atmosphere and travelled
globally, coming down anywhere or everywhere. Iridium does not occur
on earth and this find of iridium is only the second made in the
world, the first being at the original impact point in Mexico. The
comet or giant asteroid was 10km diameter, travelling at 90,000km per
hour, and landed in a shallow sea now the Yucatan area of Mexico.
This swept the Gulf area clean of almost all life. Dinosaurs died
along with smaller life forms including most mammals. Giant tsunamis
washed. About eighty per cent of plant life forms vanished. There
were massive wildfires and dust clouds affecting the atmosphere,
intense darkness for months or years, cooling the land and preventing
plant photosynthesis. It took several million years for flowering
plants to regain their ecological positions.
Update: 65 million
years ago: The dying of the dinosaurs: Researchers in New
Zealand now feel that when dinosaurs began to die out, due to giant
meteor/asteroid impact on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the following
nuclear winter amplified the effects of a major world-wide
meteorological trend that was already under way. Plant life was
reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in atmospheres, leading to
climate change. The New Zealanders include palaeontologist Chris
Hollis, who thinks that effects from the asteroid impact to date have
been over-estimated. (Reported in Australia by 19 July 2003)
70 million years ago: Estimated date for appearance of Primates.
90 million years ago: Pangea break-up enables formation of Atlantic Ocean. Modern sharks appear. Australia begins rifting from Antarctica, a process lasting to 35 million years ago.
100 million years ago: Mammals begin to appear on Earth.
100 million years ago: AT a desert in Niger, Africa, scientists have found fossils of a giant Suchomimus tenerensis. The beast, a variety of a fish-eating dinosaur, lived 100 million years ago. (Suchomimus is Greek for crocodile.)
The specimen is perhaps the best yet discovered of "an odd
group" of fish-eaters, the spinosaurids. The suchomimus
had a long, narrow snout, with sharp, cone-shaped teeth for
prey-holding, a fin-like crest down its back, and sickle-shaped
thumb-claws.
(Reported 14 November 1998, and see the journal,
Science of November, 1998)
125 million years ago: An inland sea divides the continent of Australia after it has split from Antarctica as Gondwanaland breaks up. The suggestion is that the Australian continent subsided relative to other continents.
140 million years ago: A sea known as Tethys begins to penetrate the super-continent of Pangea, intervening from the east, separating its "African" area from Asia, and eventually dividing Gondwanaland in the south from northern land masses. Early forms of dinosaurs are already evident. As Gondwanaland drifted apart, flowering plants begin to appear, firstly in West Africa and about the Amazon basin.
200 million years ago: End of a period beginning about 600 million years ago, when the South Pole is at Gondwanaland, or, Gondwanaland is about the South Pole, although the pole wanders rather mysteriously across the super-continent. Gondwanaland begins to migrate away from the South Pole about 275-245 million years ago.
215 million years ago: New dinosaur found: As almost a chance-rediscovery, an Australian paleontologist, Dr Adam Yates, working at University of Witwatersrand, Institute for Palaeontological Research, Johannesburg, has found "a new dinosaur". It's named Antetonitrus ingenipes. (Meaning, "before the thunder", massive feet".) The bones were lying idle (misclassified) on a shelf, originally dug up by a veteran fossil hunter, Prof. James Kitching (now aged 81), in the Ladybrand District of the Free State Province on Central South Africa in 1981. The remains perhaps suggest a new species of sauropod that would have been the largest land animal of its time, weighing 1.8 tonnes and about 10 metres in length. The animal lived in the late Triassic Period, 210-215 million years ago, but it is no competitor with the probably-largest sauropod, the Argentinosaurus, the heaviest land animal of all time at 100 tonnes. The new find possibly suggest how the beasts tended to such gigantism. Till now, the earliest-known sauropod was a 210-million year old Isanosaurus, found in Thailand. Now, it seems this South African specimen was millions of years older, from the very beginning of the dinosaur age.
220 million years ago: Some animals have differentiated features such as teeth, hair, egg-laying.
245 million years ago, approx: Earth has been part covered by only one large land mass, Pangea, which about now open a channel, creating Laurasia to the north and Gondwanaland to the south, which will split further to become South America, Africa, India, Antarctica and Australia. (It is thought that some of the world's most ancient rocks lie in Australia.) About now as well, the poles shift, land masses slowly move. The splitting process goes on to about 180 million years ago.
250 million years ago: Permo-Triassic Extinction, maybe due to comet impact.
254 million years ago: Experts find asteroid not to blame for
mass wipeout: New research from a team led by Professor Ian
Metcalf at University of New England, Australia, indicates that mass
extinctions (a near-annihilation of all life forms, "the Mother
of all Mass Extinctions") about now were due to widespread and
massive volcanic activity (in the area of Siberia), not an asteroid
strike. About 90 per cent of sea species were wiped out and about 70
per cent of land species. The devastation exceeded that of 65 million
years ago (near the end of the Permian Period), when a 10km asteroid
hit Earth in the region of New Mexico and led to the extinction of
the dinosaurs.
Prof. Metcalf is deputy-director of UNE's Asia
Centre. (Reported late 2002) See also Ian Plimer, A Short History
of Planet Earth. Australia, ABC Books, 2002.
300 million years ago: Use of eggs by some life forms to reproduce species.
325 million years ago: First reptiles begin to appear on earth, later arrive the dinosaurs.
350 million years ago: amphibians move from sea to land.
360 million years ago: End of Devonian Period.
370 million years ago: Fish begin to dominate the seas.
400 million-350 million years ago: North America and Europe begin to collide with giant continent Gondwanaland, including Africa, to form Pangea. Some insects, millipedes, primitive sharks, amphibians and ferns appear. Some newly-evolved fishes include lungfishes, fossils of which can be seen in the southeast Kimberley Ranges of Australia and also near Yass in New South Wales.
450 million years ago: Appearance of plant life.
450 million years ago: First sea-plants appear on earth, and move to land.
Reference item: John Gribbin, In Search of Schrodinger's Cat:
Quantum Physics and Reality. Corgi, 1990.
Reference item:
John Gribbin, In Search of the Big Bang: Quantum Physics and
Cosmology. London, Heinemann, 1986.
A bigger black hole?: Astronomers at Germany's Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have detected "overwhelming evidence" that there is a super-massive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. Occupying the black hole of a star named S2, which has a 15.2-year orbit around an unseen object which is 2.6 million times larger than our sun. A commentator on the discovery - "absolutely fantastic", was Ray Norris, deputy director of CSIRO's Australia Telescope. (Reported 18 October 2002 in Australia)
Reference item: James S. Trefil, The Moment of Creation: Big Bang Physics: From before the First Millisecond to the Present Universe. New York, Scribner, 1983.
480 million years ago: End of Cambrian Period.
500 million years ago, cells on Earth divide into two types, algae and bacteria. It is with the formation of oxygen and ozone that harmful radiation is kept out. About now, the Earth's surface has only one huge land mass today called Pangea, which lasted to about 200 million years ago.
Origins of life?: Some 500 million years ago, "a sudden proliferation of living things on Earth" coincides with an increase in meteor and comet impacts on the moon. This would correspond with the rise in animal types about 400 million years ago in what is known as "the Cambrian explosion", according to a new study in the journal, "Science", discussing how life could have been seeded by chemicals of extra-terrestrial origin, (a process called panspermia, though hotly debated). A researcher has been Paul Renne, director of Berkeley Geochronology Centre. (Reported 11 March, 2000)
535 million years ago, Alleged date for a displacement of the Earth's crust. (Date from Hancock and Faiia, p. 210. See journal, Science, 25 July 1997)
544 million years ago: Australia a cradle of modern life forms? After three million years of single-celled life on Earth, complex plants and animals burst into life as part of The Cambrian Explosion - which has remained difficult to explain. Now, three Australian researchers have suggested that 580 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into South Australia triggering a formerly-unknown mass extinction, leading to the emergence of new life. The suggestion works against earlier-known theories that a succession of global ice ages caused The Cambrian Explosion. These surprise findings arose from inspection of 2000 rock samples taken from 30 drill holes (up to 2km deep) bored in South Australia, Western Australia and Northern Territory. Before an impact, "only about six species of leiospheres existed (smooth, round organisms). After an impact appeared 60 species of spiky organisms called acritarchs. The Australian researchers were palaeontologist Kathleen Grey of Geological Survey of Western Australia, Perth, and geologist Clive Calver, molecular geneticist Simon Easteal at Australian National University, and Malcolm Walker, head of Macquarie University's Centre for Astrobiology in Sydney. The discussion has appeared in a new issue of journal Geology. (Reported in Weekend Australian, mid-year, 2003)
550 millions years ago: Appearance of life forms in phylum (that is, tribe) Chordates - from which are derived, amphibians, frogs, toads, salamanders.
600 million years ago: Shells appear in water bodies.
800 million years ago: Multicellular life seems to appear on rocks.
850,000,000 to 650,000,000 years ago: Earth experiences a severe Ice Age.
1.4 billion years ago: Appearance in rocks of bacteria Eukaryots (meaning "good nuclei" - separate nuclei are partitioned off inside a cell).
2.2 billion years ago: Earth becomes a snowball, with glaciers reaching to 11 egress of its equator.
2.4 billion years ago: Fe203 - Hematite ferric iron red-bed
formations start to form in action with atmospheric oxygen.
Temperature of the Earth's core is 5700 degrees centigrade.
3 billion years ago: Photosynthesis on Earth releases oxygen to the atmosphere.
West Australian fossil find linked to life: A renowned fossil-hunter claims to have found in Western Australia what may be the oldest life-forms on Earth to have produced oxygen. Dr Bill Schopf, of the University of California, Los Angeles, made his discovery in the ancient rocks near Marble Bar, in the remote Pilbara region of WA. Dr Schopf found eleven species of microbes, eight of them previously undescribed, preserved in rock at Chinaman Creek, 13km west of Marble Bar. They are, he says, among the oldest fossils known, having lived about 3,465 million years ago, and possibly are the oldest life-forms on Earth to have produced oxygen. The fossils appear as worm-like strings of tiny cells joined together. They are about five-thousandths of a millimetre across and can only be seen under a microscope.
Dr Schopf classifies some of the micro-fossils as "probable bacteria" and two-thirds of them as "probable cyanobacteria", like the blue-green algae of modern times. His expeditions to the Pilbara and his laboratory studies have been supported by NASA, the US space agency. NASA is interested because it is searching for signs of life elsewhere in the universe and wants to know the conditions under which life, as we know it, first appeared on Earth.
Despite its lack of human habitation, the Pilbara seems a good place for life to have started. Dr Schopf calculated the age of the deposits from radioactive analysis of zircon crystals in the surrounding rock. However, Professor Malcolm Walter, of Macquarie University, said the discovery was probably not more than 10 million years older than other rare microbes found previously in the region. Professor Walter is a long-time associate of Dr Schopf; his own work on the well-known stromatolite fossils of the Pilbara is quoted in Dr. Schopf's paper which has been published in the latest issue of the international journal, Science.
The most dramatic part of Dr. Schopf's paper is his claim that the shapes and sizes of the microbes are so similar to cyanobacteria that they may have been producing oxygen from the process of photosynthesis of water and carbon dioxide, just like their contemporary counterparts. Photosynthesis was necessary for an atmosphere of oxygen to develop which could support the vast variety of life on Earth today. Dr Schopf reckons the newly-discovered Microbes "are more than 1,300 million years older than any comparable assemblage yet found."
Professor Walter is, however, cautious in accepting Dr Schopf's interpretation of the fossils as evidence that they were of the oxygen producing type. "One bacterium looks much like another and many do not produce oxygen," he said. "In these very ancient rocks we try to wring every bit of evidence out of the shape of the fossils and their geochemistry."
"It's a very tricky business but the consensus among
scientists so far has been that the minimum age for oxygen-producing
organisms is 2,300 million years." According to Professor
Walter, the best evidence for photosynthesis in ancient times comes
from finding the characteristic residues left from the biochemical
reactions which produce oxygen and from the effect of that oxygen on
other material. Oxygen, for example, is generally believed to have
been responsible for oxidising soils and forming the giant banded
iron ores of the Hamersley Range in WA. These are 2.2 to 2.3 million
years old, well short of Dr. Schopf's claim.
(By Peter Pockley,
from The Sun-Herald, Sydney, Australia, 2 May 1993)
Life 3.5 billion years ago and the ages of rocks: One researcher's name of interest is Dr. Arthur Hickman, project manager for the Perth-based Geological Survey of Western Australia. One of his tasks is to host scientists from around the world who are finding Western Australia's old rocks to be increasingly fascinating. On such researcher is Washington geologist Roger Buick who works on rocks 2.4 to 3.5 billion years old, looking for evidence of such as molecular fossils in ancient rocks, or changes in oxygen-use of life forms as part of research which will help guide other researchers working on Mars-based projects. A sample of interest might come from e.g., the Pilbara Desert, near Marble Bar, about 250 metres down, a core sample of red-and-white banded chert, (a jasper-like rock), about 3.5 billion years old which shows the Earth then had life-sustaining levels of oxygen much like today's. The red colouration comes from iron rusted by oxygen. But it is not known if life existed this long ago. (Reported 3 July 2004)
3.5 billion years ago: Appearance of bacteria Prokarotes ("before the nucleus"):
3.7 million years ago: World's most ancient rocks: New research is being conducted on the world's most ancient rocks, 3.7 million years old, which are found in "a few small areas" of Australia, Greenland (the island of Akilla of Western Greenland), Canada and China. Do they hold clues on the origins of life. Australian researchers have lately found that some such rocks (from ancient sediments) contain material from meteorites. One researcher concerned is Dr. Allen Nutman of Australian National University. Relevant debates on ages of rocks, a lighter isotope of carbon, and was the Earth once subject of meteor showers as the Moon had once been, are now ten years old or more. (Reported in Australia in 2002)
4.4 billion years ago: Scientists using two different age-determining technigues have shown that tiny zircon crystal found on a sheep station in Western Australia us the oldest known piece of Planet Earth, dating back 4.4 billion years. The journal Nature Geoscience has reported (by about 14 February 2014) that the researchers said that the discovery indicates that the Earth's crust formed relatively soon after the planet formed and that the zircon was a remnant of it. Research was led by John Valley, a University of Wisconsin geoscience professor, said that it is possible that the early Earth was not as harsh a place as has been thought. The idea arises of a "cooly" early Earth with temperatures low enough to support water bodies, and maybe even life, earlier than has been thought. (Reported in Australia on 1-2 March 2014)
4.4 billion years ago: The Moon forms as a satellite of Earth. Moon rocks seem to be 4 million or more years old.
Astronomers examining the Milky Way by September 2002 are reporting they have "accidentally discovered" what seems to be a third-closest star system to Earth. The new star is named SO25300.5+165258 (in the constellation of Aries, a red-star dwarf, and only 7 per cent of the weight of Sol). It's as close as 7.8 light years away (75 thousand billion kilometres), whereas the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years wide. Apart from our sun, Sol, the other stars closest to Earth include: Barnard's Star which is six light years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus, and Alpha Centauri, which is a pointer star of The Southern Cross, and four light years away. The researchers included NASA astrophysicist Dr Bonnard Teegarden. (Reported 23 May 2003)
4.5 billion years ago: After the six manned US-Apollo manned probes to the moon, and three unmanned Russian probes of the 1960s, scientists theorise that a Mars-sized object hit the Earth, throwing material into orbit which became the Moon.
4.5 billion years ago: Vesta, the Asteroid: A mini-planet named Vesta has been discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope, carrying a huge dent or crater about 459km wide, while Vesta has a diameter of 531km. Vesta flies in an orbit between the Sun and Mars, and its 13km-deep crater was evidently caused by a collision about one billion years ago. Material from the collision may have produced many other asteroids now seen in space. For more, see a recent issue of journal, Science. Vesta may have been first seen by German astronomer Wilhelm Obers about 1807. One researcher involved is Richard Binzel of MIT in the US. Vesta probably formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Reported in world press, 6 September, 1997.
Knowledge of the extent of the known universe is extended
yet again. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore,
Maryland, US, have found a new and young, distant galaxy, named "RD1"
(actually, 0140+326RD1), which was apparently formed 820 million
years after the Big Bang.
(Reported by 14 March 1998)
Earth begins its career as a mass of gas about 4000 degrees centigrade. By 4700 million years ago, it is cool so gases can become liquids. At 1500 degrees centigrade, the first solid particles of crust form, and at 700 degrees centigrade, crust forms, to six miles thick. Earth history, for about 60,000 years as crust forms, is a constant downpour of rain - to cool the planet to about 20-30 degrees centigrade.
Circumference of the earth around the equator is 39,843 kilometres
– and around the poles, 39,800 kilometres. According to a
newspaper report from Philadelphia per Knight-Ridder of 3 August
2002, "the earth is getting fatter around the middle". It
is getting fatter around the middle and flatter at the poles since
1998, which puzzles scientists. NASA and a company named Raytheon
have just published new findings in the journal, Science. But
the difference is less than 25mm.
Isaac Newton first proposed in
1687 that the world was a little fatter around the middle (an oblate
spheroid), which was confirmed in 1735 by French scientists.
4.6 billion years ago: The planet Earth forms. Meteorites tend to suggest a date of 4.6 billion years for solar system formation generally.
Pluto - Distance from Sun: 5,900,000,000 km - Revolution around Sun: 248 years - Rotation: 6.4 earth days - Diameter: - About 3000km - Density: About that of water - Mass: 0.002 times that of Earth - Surface temperature: Minus 230 degrees Celsius -
Neptune - Distance from Sun: 4,504,000,000km - Revolution around Sun: 165 years - Rotation: 17.9 hours - Diameter: 48,600km Density: 1.6 times that of water - Mass: 17 times that of Earth - Surface temperature: minus 200 degrees Celsius at cloud tops -
Uranus - Distance from Sun: 2,870,000,000km - Revolution around Sun: 84 years - Rotation: about 15.6 hours - Diameter: 51,800km - Density: 1.2 times that of water - Mass: 15 times that of Earth - Surface temperature: minus 215 degrees Celsius at cloud tops -
Saturn - Distance from Sun 1,427,000,000 km - Revolution around Sun: 29.46 years - Rotation: 10.7 hours - Diameter: 120,600km - Density: 0.7 times that of water - Mass: 95 times that of Earth - Surface temperature: minus 185 degrees Celsius at cloud tops -
Jupiter - Distance from Sun: 778,300,000 km - Revolution around Sun: 11.86 years - Rotation: 9.9 hours - Diameter: 142,800km - Density: 1.3 times that of water - Mass: 318 times that of Earth - Surface temperature: minus 130 degrees Celsius at cloud tops -
Mars - Distance from Sun: 227,900,000km - Revolution around Sun: 687 days - Rotation: 24.6 hours - Diameter: 6787km - Density: 3.9 times that of water - Mass: 0.1 times that of Earth - Surface temperature: varies, average minus 50 degrees Celsius -
Earth - Distance from Sun 149,600,000km - Revolution around Sun: 365.25 days - Rotation: 23.93 hours - Diameter: 12,756km - Density: 5.5 times that of water - Mass: 6x10tothe21st metric tons - Surface temperature: varies, averages 15+ degrees Celsius -
Venus - Distance from Sun: 108,200,000km - Revolution around Sun: 225 days - Rotation: 243 days - Diameter: 12,100km - Density: 5.3 times that of water - Mass: 0.8 times that of Earth - Surface temperature: 470+ degrees Celsius -
Mercury - Distance from Sun: 57,900,000km - Revolution around Sun: 88 days - Rotation: 59 days - Diameter: 4878km - Density: 5.4 times that of water - Mass: 0.055 times that of Earth - Surface temperature: 430 degrees Celsius on day side - minus 170 degrees Celsius on night side.
And The Sun (Sol): Period of rotation: 25 days at equator (its rotation) - Mass: 333,000 times that of Earth - Diameter: 1,400,000km - Temperature: 15,000,000 degrees Celsius at core, 5500 degrees Celsius at surface. Sol rotates, and orbits the centre of our galaxy once about each 226 million years or so.
4.6 billion years ago: The interior of the Sun could hold about
1.3 million planets the size of Earth. The Sun is 15,0000,000 degrees
Celsius at its core. Sun has been active about 4.6 billion years and
has about 5 billion years of life remaining.
Check online at:
http://library.thinkquest.org/28327/
Re: 4.6 billion years ago - Earthlings are preparing to land a small spacecraft, Europe's Rosetta, on a comet named Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The voyage will take ten years and cover 11 billion kilometres. The comet destination is a ball of snow and ice about the size of a small town, and as with most comets, could be about 4.6 billion-years-old, from the period when the solar system formed. Head of the project is Dr. Gerhard Schwehm. Rosetta will be launched from Kourou, French Guiana in February 2004. It will weight three tonnes, needs 400 watts of power (think four light bulbs), and rely on solar power. Its trip will be aided by gravitational force from planets it passes. It is intended to find a landing place, release a 100kg lander, release two harpoons, then drill into the comet's icy crust, check terrain and return detailed imaged. This mission will be ended around December 2015. (Reported by 21 February 2004)
Galaxy News: Number of known asteroids between Mars and Jupiter is more than 1 million, with about 1000 with orbits which cross the orbit of Earth. (From Prof. John S. Croucher, Australia)
Galaxy News: Estimated number of stars in our galaxy is 200 billion.
Five billion years ago: The Sun, Sol, forms.
Physicist Stephen Hawking has a new theory that the
universe began as a tiny particle and will go on expanding forever.
Meantime, by March 13, 1998 was reported in Australia, "new
physics" views are arising on, not a universe, but multi-verses.
We advise, do not hold your breath till such questions are
resolved.
(Hawking: Reported 24 February 1998)
Stephen Hawking, there may be no boundary to the universe, even at the moment of creation, implying the universe is eternal and may itself be God? notes from Gribbin if the universe had no boundaries, and can be described by a unified theory, then God had no freedom to choose initial conditions, or at best, limited freedom. Did such a unified theory need a God to bring it into existence? Does God have any other effects on the universe. And who created him? To know this would be to know the mind of God... notes from Hawking's Brief History of Time)
"There is now experimental evidence that God indeed does play
dice, and what's more, she cheats. God did not create the universe in
space and time, the creation is of space and time, the universe has
no bounding surface, and so God, outside time, holds the universe
into being at every instant."
(The Sydney Morning Herald,
(10 December 1983), in a review of Paul Davies, God and the New
Physics. Dent, 1983)
10 billion years ago: Much of the universe is "dark matter": Where is the universe going? Will it continue to expand or will it "stop" and later begin to contract? Scientists are looking for "an absolute value of the density of the universe" (Prof. Rod Davies of Jodrell Bank.) Dr. John Barrow of Sussex University says researchers at Jodrell Bank have lately discovered "a faint ripple in the microwave background" of the universe, about 10 billion or so light years away. Dr Barrow with others including Dr. Peter Smith of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have discovered that 90 per cent of what is in space is "dark matter", which is non-luminous and inert. When considering space/universe, think Big Bang, think the first four forces: gravity, electromagnetism, forces pertaining to radioactivity, the forces holding together atomic nuclei. (Weekend Australian, 3-4 January 1987)
Max Whitby writes on The Big Bang "...with the Big Bang,
science has simply revealed the creation as described in Genesis, so
that in 1951, before the theory was properly formulated, the Catholic
Church in the time of Pope Pius XII adopted The Big Bang as an
official teaching position of the Church... Prof Paul Davies, retired
from Theoretical Physics at Newcastle University, feels there is a
grave problem with any idea of a God that answers prayers, sits in
judgement and involves himself in day-to-day affairs, while for
Science, to admit that God made the world is to decide that there are
areas where science cannot penetrate, and here, Alan Guth at MIT made
an advance with "inflation theory" [and The Big Bang...
during inflation, the universe siphoned energy from [a] gravitational
field to create matter... so we need to ask how the laws of physics
were arrived at, how complexity arises from simplicity...
(Sydney
Morning Herald, 31 March, 1984)
The Hills are Alive!: The surface of the Sun is covered in hills 100m high and evenly-spaced at distances of 90,000km, researchers at Stanford University and University of Hawaii have now found. Observations were made using an instrument aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory co-managed by NASA and European Space Agency. Researchers include: Jeff Kuhn, University of Hawaii, Astronomy Dept. (Reported 2 June 2000)
Do gravity waves exist?: Researchers at Australian National
University are now working with a purpose-built optics laboratory
(cost Aust$850,000) which will become part of a world-wide array of
devices which hopefully will detect gravitational waves. (Einstein
proposed that such waves exist). Director of the university facility
is Dr. David McClelland. (Reported mid-2000)
Check Website:
http://www.anu.edu.au/physics/aciga/
13 billion years ago: The oldest planet ever detected is nearly 13 billion-years-old and is more than twice the size of Jupiter. It orbits around a whirling pulsar and a white dwarf star. Its location is known as M4, about 560 light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius, as seen by Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. Harvey Richer of University of British Columbia think it may be an example of the first generation of planets formed in the universe, formed about 12.713 billion years ago as the Milky Way was forming. Earth in comparison would be a third-generation product. (Reported 11 July 2003)
Boffins say Einstein was right: French, German and Hungarian physicists have lately "corroborated" Einstein's formula E=mc squared. A team led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, have been working on the masses of protons and neutrons, the particles evident at the centre of atoms. Protons and neutrons contain quarks which are bound by glutons. But the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is a mere five per cent as they interact and exchange energy. Is 95 per cent missing? Answer. Quarks and gluons keep interacting, and mass is interchangeable with energy. (The equations used are called quantum chromodynamics. The computations involve "envisioning space and time as part of a four-dimensional crystal lattice, with discrete points spaced along columns and rows". So now you know. (Reported 22 November 2008)
New planets found, about 25 million light years away. Two teams of astronomers at University of Berkeley, California, are flabbergasted after discovering planets around a star they've named "Fomalhaut b". A first working team used the Hubble space telescope to image a giant planet orbiting Fomalhaut, a relatively young star, 25 million light years away. Another team used the giant Keck and Gemini telescopes of Hawaii to image three planets orbiting star HR8799, 130 light years away. (Reported 15 November 2008 from a recent issue of journal Science)
Working on the timing of the Big Bang: Scientists at the fourth Edoardo Amaldi Conference at University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia, are discussing the development of new technology which will enable them to discover just what happened a few seconds after the Big Bang which began our universe. However, it may take 20 years to refine the technology. A world expert on black holes and quantum physics, Prof. Kip Thorne of California Institute of Technology, says work is needed on the technology of reading gravitational waves - which are "ripples in space and time" rather like ripples on the surface of water. (Reported 10 July 2001) And in a related report, by 22 May 2001, it is reported that Australian scientists are delving back to the birth of the universe. "Virtually the entire history of the universe can now be observed", as Australian scientists trace patterns seen in space, "back to the dawn of time when the visible universe was smaller than an atom". Cosmology it is said is now in a golden age, it is thought that most of the universe is made of dark energy; the overall "shape" of the universe was apparently formed at The Planck Time, the time of the Big Bang, froze into that shape about 300,000 years after the Big Bang - and still reveals the same shape.
15,330,000,000 years ago: Our universe forms as an Expanding
Instanton.
For more, see a website from Tony Smith at:
http://www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/Hist.html/
Now return to the Lost Worlds Index
HyperHistory Online: http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/civil_n2/civ_timetable.html/
The Guardian is looking at the last millennium, at a rate of two years per day: Check out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/archive.html/
For a short timeline of Universe over a googol of years: Check: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/07/15/text/p17s2.html/
Question found on the Net? Life originated in tiny natural test
tubes? See:
http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_239000/239787.stm/
Below are items still uncollected
1939: By trial and error he cracked the Enigma Code: Peter Twinn Mathematician 1916-2004 - As a mathematician at Britain's s Bletchley Park wartime codebreaking centre, Peter Twinn, who has died aged 88, was the first of the Allies to open a signal encoded by a German Enigma machine. In 1939 Twinn answered a cryptic advertisement which sought mathematicians. He won a modestly-paid position at the Government Code and Cipher School. Decrypted Enigma messages were the basis of "Ultra" intelligence, perhaps the most closely-guarded secret of WWII. The Enigma machine had a typewriter keyboard and a "lampboard" in the same pattern. Between them lay a maze of wires through two circuit boards and three geared wheels, each imprinted with the alphabet. The operator pressed the keys and wrote down the apparently random letters they lit up. The problem was the manner in which the operator randomly set his wheels before coding. Through trial and error, Twinn experimentally assumed the first circuit did not substitute another letter for the the letter that had been typed, though the wheels and the final circuit board both did so. This educated guess helped Twinn in late 1939 to decipher a Wermacht message, though Twinn modestly played this down. It was a breakthrough,and early in 1940 came more penetration of German messaging - a message was decoded the day it was sent! After the war, Twinn worked at the UK Ministry of technology where he became director of hovercraft, later appointed secretary of Royal Aircraft Establishment. He was also a musician (clarinet and viola) and also interested in insects; he would borrow the establishment's special cameras to photograph them. During the war he married Rosamund Case, a cipher school colleague who shared his love of music His wife, three daughters and a son survive him. (Obituary by Dan van der Vat, The Guardiani>, seen in Australia 18 December 2004)
1922: Shackleton dies near South Georgia en route to Antarctica.
1956: Vivian Fuchs and Ed Hilary succeed in crossing the Antarctic continent as Shackleton had earlier hoped to.
1588: Italy: Galileo finds a position at University of Pisa and delivers two lectures on the vexing problem - how large is hell? (He found that it is shaped like an ice-cream cone radiating from the centre of the earth, and is basically below Jerusalem, with edges about Marseilles and Tashkent). This, from the man who said the earth moves around the sun, and not vice-versa.
1901: USA: Dr. Duncan McDougall finds that he has successfully weighed the human soul, at one ounce.
1905: South Africa: The world's largest diamond, the Cullinan, is discovered near Pretoria, South Africa, weighing in at 3106 carats.
1948: USA: NBC-TV begins airing its first nightly newscast.
1959: Fidel Castro is sworn in an prime minister of Cuba after leading a guerilla campaign that ousts right-wing dictator, Fulgencio Batista on 1 January. (By 2005, Castro is still at the helm of Cuba!)
1968: USA: The USA inaugurates its first 911 emergency telephone system in Haleyville, Alabama.
1970: Soviet Russia: Moscow says Arab nations will receive “necessary support:” from the Soviet Union in their dispute(s) with Israel.
1978: Japan and China sign US$20 billion trade pact in Beijing.
1931: India: Mahatma Ghandi is released from prison and to hold talks with government, all part of his campaign of civil disobedience.
1965: Vietnam: The military seizes power in South Vietnam, ousting the civilian government of Tran Van Huong.
2001: India: An earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter Scale strikes the western Indian state of Gujarat, killing 18,000 people.
1942: Japanese submarine shells an oil refinery near Santa Babara, California, USA.
Empire, 1970: Indian-Pacific Train between Sydney and Perth makes its first run.
1981: Spain: Attempted coup begins in Spain as 200 members of the Civil Guard invade Parliament, taking lawmakers hostage, an attempt that last only 18 hours and then collapses.
1199AD: King Richard I the Lionhearted of England dies after being wounded while besieging the castle of Chalus in France. He is succeeded by his brother John.
1789: George Washington elected first president of United States of America.
1862: Battle of Shiloh of American Civil War conducted in Tennessee.
1941: German bombers attack Belgrade. About 2500 people are killed and hundreds of buildings burn down. Included in the destruction is National Library which contains hundreds of mediaeval manuscripts.
2008 file, This website has wondered before if the USA really is the home of free speech? So we wondered about this snippet. "Our study suggests Wikipedia is six times more liberal [in outlook] than the American public." (From a long article by Tim Adams on Wikipedia and its founder Jimmy Wales. About 1700 articles are added to Wikipedia each day. (Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, 18 August, 2007)
From www.history.com/ By Christopher Klein . Accessed 6-4-2015.
It looks like mankind may have suddenly aged by nearly a half-million years. According to a pair of newly published papers in the journal Science, paleoanthropologists working in Ethiopia have discovered a 2.8-million-year-old jawbone, making it the oldest fossil in the human ancestral line ever found by more than 400,000 years. The finding could fill important gaps in scientists’ understanding of human evolution.
Under a searing African sun on January 29, 2013, an international team of paleoanthropologists scoured a dusty plateau looking for clues to the origins of mankind. Aboveground, the surrounding Ethiopian landscape at the northern end of the Rift Valley looked barren, but the field team knew that a bounteous crop of fossils could lurk just beneath the surface. Just 40 miles away, an earlier generation of paleoanthropologists in 1974 had unearthed the partial skeleton of the famous “Lucy,” a 3.2-million-year-old hominid.
More than 40 years later, however, a large gap in the human family tree has remained. Researchers have discovered numerous fossils from Lucy’s Australopithecus afarensis species—ape-like, bipedal human ancestors approximately 4 feet tall—that are 3 million years or older. They have also found numerous skeletal remnants from multiple lines of the human genus Homo—of which Homo sapiens are the only remaining species—that are 2.3 million years old and younger. Little, however, has been discovered from that interim 700,000-year period to explain or date the evolution from Australopithecus to Homo that occurred during that timeframe, and that gap in the fossil record has hampered scientists’ understanding of human origins.
The international team of paleoanthropologists working in Ethiopia in 2013 sought to close that gap by uncovering fossil evidence of human ancestors. The researchers, co-led by Arizona State University professors, spent a decade surveying the area before beginning the process of fossil collection in 2012. They had expected to find more specimens of Lucy’s species, but what they discovered instead turned out to be more surprising.
Chalachew Seyoum, an Ethiopian native and Ph.D. student at Arizona State, was scouring the edge of a barren ridge when something caught his eye. He immediately knew he had spotted something important in the eroded hillside and cried out to his fellow team members, who raced up the plateau. What Seyoum showed them gave them goose bumps. It was the well-preserved left side of a hominid’s lower jaw with five teeth attached. The fossil itself was small, but it turns out that its implications could be enormous.
According to a pair of papers published last week in the journal Science, the jawbone is the oldest fossil in the human ancestral line to have ever been found and dated, and it pushes back the timeline of human evolution by nearly a half-million years. The analysis of the lower jaw found more similarities with younger east African Homo specimens than older Australopithecus afarensis ones. The specimen’s primitive, sloping chin resembled that of Lucy, but its slimmer molars, symmetrical premolars and rounder, evenly proportioned jaw distinguished it as a member of the Homo genus. “Our detailed study of this specimen shows that it is more advanced, closer to humans, than previously discovered fossils in this area that date from around 3 million years ago back to about 3.5 million years ago,” paleoanthropologist Bill Kimbel, director of Arizona State’s Institute of Human Origins, said in the university-released video.
Radiometric testing of the layers of volcanic ash surrounding the fossil has revealed the approximate age of the jawbone to be between 2.75 and 2.8 million years old, which makes it the earliest evidence of the Homo genus ever discovered. Prior to the find, the oldest known Homo fossil had been a 2.3-million-year-old upper jaw also found in northern Ethiopia, so the dating pushes back the origin of the Homo genus by at least 400,000 years.
It is thought that at the time that the human ancestor lived, the section of Ethiopia in which it was found more closely resembled the Serengeti with open grasslands near lakes and rivers frequented by grazing animals such as gazelles and zebras. Research remains to be done, however, to discover what the specimen ate and whether it employed stone tools. More work needs to be done as well to determine whether it could be from a previously unknown human species or an extinct one such as Homo habilis.
The hope is that the fossil could serve as a crucial clue in the knowledge gap of evolutionary history. “The importance of the specimen is that it adds a data point to a period of time in our ancestry in which we have very little information,” Kimbel said. “This is a little piece of the puzzle that opens the door to new types of questions and field investigations that we can go after to try to find additional evidence to fill in this poorly known time period.”
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