Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry talks about the laws of nature, physics, astronomy, and the mysterious inception of our cosmos, the universe, stars, and implicitly our beautiful planet where life thrives and perpetuates.

There’s one thing that scientists agree upon: we know that we don’t know. There’s only so much that science had discovered about the universe, our planets, the stars, and how life emerged. We know that the laws of physics have an effect on all these things, but we don’t know which effect that is.

We know that there is a lot of dark matter that is yet to be discovered, as only one-sixth of the mass in the universe is made of galaxies and gas clouds. Scientists still don’t know how to detect the rest of the mass, as we don’t even have the devices to recognize new matter.

In terms of how our planet came to life, we know that it happened through a small dot that expanded at a huge rate. Still, it took 380,000 years to have light separate from matter. 14 billion years have passed by, and stars emerged in the process, one of which is our precious Sun.

Helium might seem like a common, day-to-day matter, but it carries a very interesting story. It was first discovered in the Sun’s spectrum, way before it was discovered on Earth. A fun fact about it is that the word helium means Sun in Greek. Cool, right? Now back to our point.

Its discovery reveals interesting insights, such as that celestial matters operate under similar laws to ours. Newton found that too when he discovered the laws of gravity. Gravity is a universal law of nature, which means that it applies to outer space too.

The similarities we share with the universe can only make us wonder: What if there are other things we have in common, such as life? Are there aliens out there somewhere? If so, the Chinese people will be the first ones to know! They’ve built the biggest radio telescope on earth to study prospective aliens and discover them.

Before everything we know today came to life, the energy and matter that makes up the Universe, the galaxies, planets, stars, matter, and everything in between, was concentrated into a tiny dot. The dot exploded and started to cool off rapidly, giving way for celestial matter to form. Essentially, that’s the story of the Big Bang. After the dot exploded, the forces keeping the dot condensed all separated, which resulted in gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the nuclear force. The matter then went on to become a bunch of subatomic particles (or electrons, neutrons, and quarks) Everything started to cool off…