NEW YORK: About 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began in a big bang. With it was born space, time and a fiery soup of exotic subatomic particles. Of this, cosmologists are reasonably confident.
In the first fraction of a second, the super-hot universe – with a temperature of 10,000 trillion trillion degrees – inflated in size by 100 trillion trillion times. The expansion continues today but at a far more leisurely pace.
When it was one second old, the now-inflated universe contained matter, radiation and the four basic forces of nature. After, only three minutes, the expanding cosmos had cooled enough for the first three elements – hydrogen, helium and lithium – to start forming.
After a few hundred million years of pitch-black darkness – a period dubbed the cosmic Dark Ages – the great ignition began. This was when the first stars lit up the sky as galaxies assembled from vast clouds of frigid primordial matter that condensed under the embrace of gravity.
The conversion of cold, virtually inert gas into dazzlingly hot suns continued for billions of years, seeding the universe with billions upon billions of galaxies, each containing billions upon billions of stars.
One of those galaxies was our own Milky Way, its vast agglomeration of matter arranged in luminous spiral arms sprouting from a central spherical bulge.
Tesla driverless system to use updated radar technology
WASHINGTON: Electric carmaker Tesla announced Sunday it was upgrading its Autopilot software to use more advanced radar technology. In a...
