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Chapter Two: Welcome To The Solar System

The Facts:

• Pluto, our ex-9th planet has the largest moon in the Solar System
• Pluto was the first American discovered planet
• Beyond Pluto lies the Kuiper belt which contains the famous Halley's comet.
• Pluto is .25% the size of Earth and has a highly irregular orbit compared to the planets of our Solar System, it is at times closer to Earth than Neptune
• 1 AU(Astonomical Unit) is equal to the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
• 1 AU = 1.58128451 × 10-5 light year = 149,597,871 kilometers
• The average distance between stars is 30 million million kilometers
• Pluto was considered a planet in 1999 and dismissed as a planet in 2006

Summary:

The Solar System and surrounding larger bodies are not always being watched. Scientists study sections of interest while amateurs attempt to catch a glimpse of nearby celestial bodies that their telescopes can manage to capture. In the early 1920s an astronomer named Percival Lowell was attempting to discover a mystery "Planet X" beyond Neptune that was a gas giant larger than Jupiter. He died in his attempt to find the giant, but 13 years later Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto.

Space is immense and our solar system is but 1 trillionth of its entirety. We launched the Voyager space crafts in August and September of 1977 and they are now traveling 56,000 kilometers an hour via sling shots of gravity from a special alignment that occurs once every 175 years between our gassy giants(Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune). If we were to represent the true scale of our solar system with Earth the size of a pea, Jupiter would be 300 meters away and Pluto would be 2.5 Kilometers. Our nearest star Proxima Centauri would be 16,000 kilometers away. Beyond our planets and the dwarf planet Pluto lies the Kuiper belt and beyond that is the Oort cloud that stretches 2 light years outward.

Frank Drake devised an equation to determine the chances of advanced life in the Cosmos. Under even the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations within just the Milky Way was calculated to be in the millions. The average distance between these civilizations was calculated to be at least 200 light years away.

Zoom In

Chapter One: How to Build a Universe

The Facts:

• 1 light-year(distance light travels in 1 year) = 9460730472580800 metres (exactly) ≈ 5.878625 trillion miles ≈ 63241.077 astronomical units ≈ 0.306601 parsecs
• During the big bang temperatures were at 10 billion degrees
• Main initial ingredients: hydrogen and helium with a hint of lithium
• After 3 minutes of the initial bang 98% of all matter was produced
• Universe is 13.8 billion years old
• The visible end of the universe is 90 billion trillion miles away(~100 billion light years across)
• The Universe doubled every 10^-34 seconds under the inflation theory proposed by Alan Guth

Summary:

The Universe started as a infinitely small singularity with space only inside and nothing outside of it, space is created as it expands. In a single second it expanded massively and after a few minutes it is billions of miles wide.

Ancient cosmic radiation exists from the beginning of the universe and was discovered by two scientists testing equipment for bell with a large communications antenna. They were attempting to receive a clear signal but would always get noise, what they didn't realize was they were intercepting cosmic radiation in the form of microwaves from the beginning of the universe postulated by George Gamow(Russian scientists).

The chances that the universe turned out correctly for life are slim. If gravity had been slightly stronger or weaker then elements and conditions created would have been different and may not have been able to support life. Therefore, scientists agree that universes occur often if not infinitely and there are multiple universes in history even though we understand only one time and one t=0.

Scientists predict 3 possibilities for future of the universe:

• Closed: Gravity will end up being too strong and the universe will collapse on itself and shrink back to a singularity.
• Open: Universe will continue to expand until everything is so far apart reactions no longer occur and everything becomes stagnant and "dead".
• Flat: The "Goldilocks effect", everything is just right and the Universe will eventually stop expanding allowing things to exists to no end.

The Universe is endless in that a person who believes the Earth is flat would end up walking around the Earth and arriving in the same place.

Hello, I'm going to be reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Each chapter will be a separate post with basic facts of the chapter displayed at the top then a summary of what I think is important below.