Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Locating humans in the Universe
- 2 The race toward complexity
- 3 The stellar alchemy of metals
- 4 The formation of the planets
- 5 The emergence of life
- 6 The history of life
- 7 The awakening of intelligence
- 8 The other worlds
- 9 Perspectives
- APPENDIX A The standard model of the physics of elementary particles
- APPENDIX B Symmetry in physics
- APPENDIX C The strange role of time in relativity
- APPENDIX D The measurement of long time spans and the age of the Universe
- APPENDIX E The standard model of the Big Bang
- APPENDIX F The cause of the Big Bang and inflation
- APPENDIX G Chirality
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Figure index
- Table index
- Name index
- Subject index
4 - The formation of the planets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Locating humans in the Universe
- 2 The race toward complexity
- 3 The stellar alchemy of metals
- 4 The formation of the planets
- 5 The emergence of life
- 6 The history of life
- 7 The awakening of intelligence
- 8 The other worlds
- 9 Perspectives
- APPENDIX A The standard model of the physics of elementary particles
- APPENDIX B Symmetry in physics
- APPENDIX C The strange role of time in relativity
- APPENDIX D The measurement of long time spans and the age of the Universe
- APPENDIX E The standard model of the Big Bang
- APPENDIX F The cause of the Big Bang and inflation
- APPENDIX G Chirality
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Figure index
- Table index
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
Hence there are innumerable suns and an infinite number of earths turning around these suns in the same way as the seven earths that we see turn around the sun which is near us.
Giordano Bruno, De l'infinito universo e mundi, 1584The Universe grows old
Enormous stretches of time have elapsed since the Big Bang. The twilight of the first million years has been transformed into near complete darkness. The fossil radiation, a relic of the Big Bang, that was still dimly lighting the large cooling masses of gas, has diluted and shifted to the infrared, because the expansion of space goes on. This radiation soon becomes completely invisible. In the opaque night of the first billion years, the masses of gas become more and more patchy. This is because density fluctuations increased, and the aggregates of gas were more and more separated, first into superclusters, then clusters of galaxies, and finally into galaxies.
The ‘timeless night’ probably ends during the second billion years, because the quasars light up the central clusters of many galaxies. Their dazzling light hides the simultaneous appearance of many small bright dots that studded the galactic halos. The stars have just lit up, in the globular clusters and in the large central cluster of many galaxies.
The galaxies each evolve somewhat differently. They display a large diversity in sizes, and in angular momenta, which comes from the turbulence in the gas masses.
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- Our Cosmic OriginsFrom the Big Bang to the Emergence of Life and Intelligence, pp. 69 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998