Love it when it snows

With all of this navel gazing I found some lint.

Sorry, MC, I cannot vouch for that.

Not your area. I understand. Fascinated me since childhood. Oh well. Easy enough for people to look it up and see. If they don’t want to take my word for it. Which they shouldn’t. Even though its all crazy true.

to what did the universe expand from? I never studied astrophysics so I’m always fascinated by the subject so I’m being sincere here.

Okay so now we got all the matter there is, expanding out making all the space there is bigger and bigger. This is like hours, days, something like that (look it up) past the big one.

At which point - oh but wait, this is kinda cool. All that energy from the Big Bang? Its like a bell that’s been rung, its still slowly faintly ringing. Couple guys, Penzias and Wilson? whatever not gonna look it up their radio telescope had this noise and nothing they did would get rid of it, no matter which way they point the damn thing its there. Finally figure out its the remnant echo of the Big Bang. Won em a Nobel.

So anyway this all happened. Multiple lines of evidence.

Back to matter. Its almost all hydrogen. Because when the energy cooled and the matter formed it was electrons, protons, neutrons. They start pairing up and form hydrogen, one proton, one electron. Sometimes one neutron too. But usually one e, one p.

This hydrogen is all there is. Its expanding. Really fast. And hot. But cooling. Slowly cooling. And slowing down. Because, gravity. The mass of the cloud itself is trying to draw it all back together. (Remember this for later, happens again!) So its expanding, but slower and slower. To this very day.

Not uniformly. Some regions are a little more dense than others. What will later become local groups of galaxies separate out. Within those regions other clumps are drawn together by their mutual gravitational pull and will become galaxies. Same process happens within those and forms stars.

But not ours. Not yet. The first stars are super massive. The way stars work, the more massive the faster they burn through their hydrogen.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Really freaking interesting. Because, think of it, there’s only hydrogen. Look around. Do you see any hydrogen? Ha! You see everything BUT hydrogen! Where’s all these other elements come from?

Good question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJQjjBR6PbY

That’s right! When Carl Sagan said we are star stuff, he wasn’t just being poetic. We literally are.

Cliff Notes for those who won’t put in the hour to watch the (totally worth it) video: stars fuse hydrogen into helium. Really massive stars then keep on going using up the helium and in the process creating more elements. Eventually if the star is massive enough it goes supernova. The star collapses, and in this cataclysmic collapse the pressures and temperatures at the core of the star are so immense all the other elements on the periodic table are formed.

The release of all this energy then causes the star to explode, sending all these elements out into interstellar space.

So that when new stars form they have around them planets with all these elements. Elements like carbon. On which we are all based.

But seriously, watch the video. Coolest thing ever.

You misunderstand, MC. It is my area. I was being tactful. 🤗 I give you an A for enthusiasm, though.

Millercarbon is correct.
We are now exiting what was a Grand Solar Maximum.....

Anyone here care to look up the term Grand Solar Minimum? It is what we are heading into now.....Hence the INCREASE in polar cap ice recently.
I'm old enough to remember in the 70's when everyone was running around screaming about Earth's next ICE AGE! Oh the horror!!!
That was during the peak of a previous Grand Solar Minimum....
The SUN has the power to change our climate....NOT cow farts.

You misunderstand, MC. It is my area. I was being tactful. 🤗 I give you an A for enthusiasm, though.

Okay. Fair enough. However since you’ve just cast aspersions its only fair you give us a reason. Tell you what. Help me get better. Find just one thing, worst most garbled or whatever, just quote it and show us how its wrong.

Meanwhile we can all watch this and maybe begin at least to understand why I say Jordan Peterson is our greatest living intellectual. He’s like the Carl Sagan of intellectuals. Sagan didn’t give us equations. He brought science to the masses by making it cool and transcending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7iHFjrwRCI