We are here because, more than ten billion years ago, the universe borrowed energy from the vacuum to create vast amounts of matter and antimatter in nearly equal numbers. Most of it annihilated and filled the universe with photons. Less than one part per billion survived to form protons and neutrons, and then the hydrogen and helium that makes up most of the everything there is. Some of this hydrogen and helium collapsed to make the first generation of massive stars, which produced the first batch of heavy elements in their central nuclear fires. These stars exploded and enriched the interstellar clouds that would form the next generation stars. Finally, about five billion years ago, once particular cloud in one particular galaxy collapsed to form our Sun and its planetary system. Life arouse on the third planet, based on the hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and other elements found in the protostellar cloud. The development of life transformed Earth's atmosphere and allowed life to move onto land. Sixty-five million years ago, a fortunate collision with a large meteoroid hastened the demise of the dinosaurs and allowed small furry mammals to take center stage. Primitive men and women evolved and moved out of Africa to conquer the world with their new knowledge of tools, language and agriculture. After raising food on our land, our ancestors, our parents and then we consumed this food and breathed the air. Our own body is a collection of the atoms where were created billions of years earlier in the interiors of stars, the fraction of a fraction of a percent of normal matter that escaped annihilation in the first microsecond of the universe. Our life and everything in the world around us is intimately tied to countless aspects of modern astrophysics.
By: B. Carroll and D. Ostlie
posted by Nikhil @ 4:10 PM
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