 Guest Article - Our Universe
ScienceMan is very proud to present "Our Universe", and is honoured have guest author and scientist Gale Martha contribute this ambitious multi-part article.
The goal here is to provide an overview of how Our Universe began, and to provide a bit of insight for the layman about the role of subatomic particles in the different stages of Universe creation.
Thank you Gale, for providing this interesting and expansive article.
Our Universe
If you have ever wondered about the world we live in - all the different objects we encounter every day and how they interact with each other and the changes that they undergo, then you have asked a fundamental question which scientists still cannot completely answer. We still don't really know what matter is fundamentally made up of and we don't know the whole story of how matter and energy interact. And that is just the ordinary world around us. We are rapidly discovering that there are much less ordinary things out there in the universe - things that defy common sense, things that appear to defy the laws of physics themselves!
So let's begin our look at Our Universe - read one article after the other (there are links at the end of each article), or use the following links to jump to a particular section:
- Water
- The Big Bang Begins - Planck Epoch
- The Universe's First Baby Picture
- Grand Unifcation Epoch
- Inflationary Epoch
- Electroweak Epoch
- Quark Epoch
- Hadron Epoch
- Lepton Epoch
- Photon Epoch
- Decoupling Epoch
- The Dark Age
- Stelliferous Era
Our Universe - Part Thirteen: Stelliferous Era
Stelliferous means "filled with stars." This age begins when the universe is about 100 million years old when the first star forms and it will continue until about 100 trillion years from now when the last star is made, leaving all stellar objects to degenerate and decay.
The universe is 150 million years old and the first stars have just formed from collapsing halos of mostly hydrogen gas. These first stars are likely to be massive and they are drastically changing the environment in which they are formed, affecting the formation of subsequent stars. Stars emit a large amount of photons that ionize hydrogen gas, create pockets of gas as hot as 10,000 K. These highly energized ions may have been capable of creating shock waves. These would trigger other halo collapses and eventually lead to widely dispersed star formation throughout the early universe, ultimately leading to the massive array of galaxies and other objects we have in our universe today, including us!
Thank you for joining me on this respective journey into the creation of Our Universe. But what about the current picture of our universe? And will it all end some day? The story isn't over yet . . .
Editor's Note:
Got something to say about this article? There's a post at the ScienceMan Blog where you can put in your two bits about Our Universe. Hope to hear from you!
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