The New Biography of the Universe

By Matthias Matting

May I introduce: the universe. Born 13.75 billion years ago. Constantly growing. Nearly empty. Electrically neutral. Poor in antimatter. Populated by 100 billion galaxies, including 130 sextillion stars with approximately just as many planets.
Consisting of only 4 percent known forms of matter. The other 96 percent is made up of 23 percent dark matter and 73 percent dark energy. The home of black holes, giant stars, pulsars, quasars, galaxy clusters, and nebulas - and to many planets and their moons, as well as lifeforms such as humans.

Where did the universe come from? What were the conditions at its birth? What amazing processes have been taking place since then? When and how will it die? What science knows about these things has changed dramatically in recent years. Let yourself be taken away into a world that goes beyond everything imaginable – the universe in which you live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Feb 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9783844224320

Book preview

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Presenting the Universe

Chapter 2. The Time Before Time

A world made from strings

Loop over loop

Reborn from nothing

Nothing but theories?

Chapter 3. The Big Bang

The 0 hour

The laws of physics begin

The world – a soccer ball

The first particles

All of the forces are already there

The next round of extinction

Chapter 4. The Clear Universe

The first beacons

They die young

A fascinating death

Group dynamics

Fragile spirals

Planets from the waste

Chapter 5. The Life and Death of Stars

Too small: brown dwarfs

The Joe Six-Pack of the universe: red dwarfs

The Sun’s relatives: main-sequence stars

The future of the Sun: white dwarf

Extremely dense: neutron stars

The odd balls: quark stars

Where space and time are meaningless: black holes

Even stranger: exotic stars

How large can stars be? The hyper-giants

Chapter 6. The Planets

Our home: The Solar System

Life-giving: the Sun

The closest to the Sun: Mercury

The most like Earth: Venus

The blue planet: Earth

The red planet: Mars

An unfinished work: the Asteroid Belt

Holding everything together: Jupiter

The lord of the Rings: Saturn

The icy one: Uranus

Another blue planet: Neptune

Way out there: the Kuiper Belt

The garbage dump: the Oort Cloud

The extraterrestrials: exoplanets

The mavericks: planemos

Chapter 7. The End of the Universe

Death by freezing

Death by tearing apart

Death by being crunched

Death by annihilation

Death by disintegration

Death by solidification

One cross each!

The future biography of the universe

Chapter 1. Presenting the Universe

May I introduce: the universe (from Latin universum for whole, also known as cosmos, outer space, and macrocosm). Let’s look at some of its traits:

Born 13.75 billion years ago. Today, the universe measures approximately 92 billion light-years (though it is probably infinite and topologically flat) and weighs 10 to the power of 53 kilograms (a 1 followed by 53 zeros). Nevertheless, it’s still not done growing.

On the run. Because the universe is constantly growing, all of its parts appear to be moving away from us. And the farther an object is from Earth, the faster it appears to be moving away. Based on the Hubble constant, an object at a distance of one megaparsec (a good 3 million light-years) is moving at a speed of 72 kilometers per second away from Earth.

Almost -270 degrees Celsius. What keeps it from absolute zero is the contribution of the cosmic background radiation.

Empty. Our night sky is full of stars. This picture is misleading, however, because the universe is basically made up of empty space. If someone built a gigantic house, 30 km x 30 km x 30 km, only a single grain of sand in this house would be enough to produce a comparable average density. Every cubic meter of the universe contains, on average, 0.3 protons.

Electrically neutral. There appear to be just as many positive charge carriers as negative.

(Picture 1: The European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory peers into the Rosette Nebula – a nursery for numerous stars – at a distance of 5000 light-years from Earth)

Poor in antimatter. This observation is a clue that the laws of nature do not apply equally to particles and their corresponding antiparticles.

No middle. Our Milky Way does indeed have a core, but the universe as a whole has no such center.

Populated by 100 billion galaxies, including 130 sextillion stars with approximately just as many planets. In the universe, there are more stars than grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth.

Consisting of 4 percent known forms of matter. These known forms of matter include, for example, approximately 1.57 x 10 to the power of 79 protons and electrons and a billion times more photons. The other 96 percent is made up of 23 percent dark matter and 73 percent dark energy. Between 90 and 99 percent of the neutral atoms in the universe are hydrogen atoms.

The home of black holes, giant stars, pulsars, quasars, galaxy clusters, and nebulas. The universe is also home to planets and their moons, as well as lifeforms such as humans.

Where did the universe come from? What were the conditions