The Universe: And Then There Was Light….

[RonPrice]

The Universe(1) is an American documentary television series which first appeared in the UK in 2007 and it continued to the end of 2011. I did not begin watching the series in Australia until 2012. Computer-generated imagery and computer graphics of astronomical objects, as well as interviews with experts in the fields of cosmology, astronomy and astrophysics make this series fascinating for people like me whose knowledge of these fields has always been minimal.

 

I have had a fascination with these subjects since the start of the space age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, since my becoming affiliated with the Bahá'í Faith back in the 1950s during my adolescence, and since having the influence of a maternal grandfather who was also interested in these fields. It is difficult not to be interested in the subject being in the first generation to see the movement of man into space in the last five decades. But I have never followed-up that interest in any serious way other than: (a) to attend two or three of those planetariums that dot the landscape of the cities of the world, (B) to browse through a few books and © to listen and watch the occasional special on astronomy in the electronic media like the one to which I refer above.-Ron Price with thanks to 17TWO TV, 25-26 February 2012, 11:45 p.m. to 12:50 a.m. and The Universe(TV Series) at Wikipedia.

 

Now that I am retired from

the world of jobs, meetings

and what now seems like an

endless amount of socializing,

I can give myself to learning &

the cultural attainments of the

mind. I really got going with the

fields of astronomy, cosmology

and astrophysics in the year ’09:1

 

1 The International Year of Astronomy 2009 was a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day-and-night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery. In 2009 astronomy celebrated four centuries of its modern existence, beginning with Galileo in 1609. In December 2010 a National Geographic video-documentary was televised. It was entitled: Journey to the Edge of the Universe. I have written about this before.

 

In the first years of my retirement from FT, PT and volunteer work, 2005-2012, there has been an increasing range of stimuli that have turned me toward astronomy of which the series I mention and that National Geographic video above are but two. It will be interesting to see the development of this interest in these middle years(65-75) of my late adulthood, the years from 60 to 80 according to one model of human development in the lifespan.

 

The cosmic dark age, perhaps as long

as 10 to 12 billion or more years, is but

one of the great mysteries of astronomy.1

 

1 John Mather who won the Nobel prize for physics in 2006 said this. He is a senior astrophysicist at the U.S. space agency's (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

 

What brought this cosmic dark age to an end was the birth of the first stars and galaxies. "Suddenly light was everywhere," says Abraham Loeb of Harvard's Centre for Astrophysics. "The Universe lit up like a Christmas tree."

 

Ron Price

29 February 2012

[JMJones0424]

The cosmic dark age, perhaps as long

as 10 to 12 billion or more years, is but

one of the great mysteries of astronomy.1

 

1 John Mather who won the Nobel prize for physics in 2006 said this. He is a senior astrophysicist at the U.S. space agency's (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

 

 

Do you have a source for this quote? I searched and only found your posts in other forums. As has been said to you elsewhere, I think you have dramatically misread or misunderstood the original quote. I suspect a correct version would read more like: The cosmic dark age, which ended perhaps as long as 10 to 12 billion or more years ago, is but one of the great mysteries of astronomy.

[RonPrice]

Do you have a source for this quote? I searched and only found your posts in other forums. As has been said to you elsewhere, I think you have dramatically misread or misunderstood the original quote. I suspect a correct version would read more like: The cosmic dark age, which ended perhaps as long as 10 to 12 billion or more years ago, is but one of the great mysteries of astronomy.

----------------------

Thanks, JMJones0424. I have checked my sources and I think you are right. As I was writing this prose-poem I was thinking "this can't be right even if it comes from a respectable source." After going back to Mather--you are right.

 

With appreciation for your close reading.

 

Ron Price

Edited March 3, 2012 by RonPrice

[Cyberia]

The earliest galaxy so far is from 13.2 billion years ago, but it would have formed upto a few hundred million years earlier.

 

Some of the earliest stars were just hydrogen which quickly burned and nova-ed, producing heavier elements for later stars (and planets).

[RonPrice]

The earliest galaxy so far is from 13.2 billion years ago, but it would have formed upto a few hundred million years earlier.

 

Some of the earliest stars were just hydrogen which quickly burned and nova-ed, producing heavier elements for later stars (and planets).

--------------------

That "cosmic dark age" to which my original post referred seems to be currently thought to have lasted between 150 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang. The recent (October 2010) discovery of UDFy-38135539, the first observed galaxy to have existed during the following reionization epoch, gives us a window into these times. There was a report in January 2011 of yet another more than 13 billion years old that existed a mere 480 million years after the Big Bang.(Source Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Big_Bang#Dark_ages )

[newdealtn]

I'm recalling off-hand, but I believe I heard a figure of 380,000 years after the Big Bang that light (photons) was first released from a bondage to matter--I have no idea what that was (?)--and the energy which is now remembered in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation of some three degrees Kelvin was first illuminated into space. Has anyone else seen this figure or do you know the phenomenon to which it refers? Isn't Cosmology and Astronomy just fascinating?

[RonPrice]

I'm recalling off-hand, but I believe I heard a figure of 380,000 years after the Big Bang that light (photons) was first released from a bondage to matter--I have no idea what that was (?)--and the energy which is now remembered in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation of some three degrees Kelvin was first illuminated into space. Has anyone else seen this figure or do you know the phenomenon to which it refers? Isn't Cosmology and Astronomy just fascinating?

--------------------

I can't help you, Samm, with this figure or the phenomenon to which it refers. Cosmology and astronomy are, as you say, fascinating. They are fascinating, to me, for several reasons not the least of which is their distance from: the microworlds, the daily trivia, all the little stuff, and the mundanities which we all must deal with just to get through the day and through our lives. The staggering nature of the distances and the phenomena in general which the wisdom of the wise and the learning of the learned will never comprehend are absolutely wondrous.-Ron

[Little Bang]

Ron is it possibly that there was light and then there was the Universe?

[Cyberia]

Ron is it possibly that there was light and then there was the Universe?

 

If you use the BB idea, very high energy particles were created in the first second and since such particles would give off high energy photons there would be light. No stars but a haze.