Somewhere on the outside plains of ****** Town...[]
10:30 p.m...[]
Tom's House...[]
Backyard Area...[]
The moon has risen over the horizon as it showed itself on the night sky, as well as the stars, that showed themselves against the warm reaches of the night sky, the atmosphere of the landscape being a bit lukewarm like a nice, hot cup of coffee on a cold winter's night, and them shining and gleaming ever so brightly amidst the entire darkened landscape. The area below felt silent and a few movements can be heard, mostly from the waves of the cold grass as it waved in sync through the night's cold breeze, and certain Pokémon making noises that could be compared to those of cicadas making their trademark noises at night.
A certain old, but still young boy just went out of his house from the back area, closing the door gently and walked towards the backyard, his footsteps not too loud as it slid against the cold ground, the boy feeling the cold breeze on his face as he went to a tree not far from his home. He then unpacked what looks like to be a phone of some kind, and began to lay himself down against the hard, but comfortable trunk of the tree, him silently using his phone as he decided to watch something from it.
He finally decided to watch a documentary for time being.
Tom sat comfortably on his back on the tree that they called the "Meeting Tree" that their little group always hang out in, enjoying the cool night breeze as it spread its embrace across his face, as he was watching a documentary about the inner workings of the Celestial Bodies in Outer Space, namely the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, and how they all fit into the foundation of how the universe works and how do they work autonomously, providing their respective capabilities to keep the flow of the cosmos up and running, as well as how the entire galaxy works in full conjunction to every Planet, Star, Asteroid and Celestial Body in the far reaches of the universe.
Probably.
/Received and audible transcripts of a certain documentary found on a prominent documentary series.../
/Start of Transcript/
- ...But where is Earth? It's in the solar system, between Venus and Mars, one might say.
But where is that? The solar system is the main part of the Oort cloud, a vast collection of comets, asteroids, and icy objects swirling at the fringes of the Sun's sphere of influence. The Oort cloud resides in the Local Interstellar Cloud, which is in the Local Cavity of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with beautiful, sweeping arms of millions upon millions of stars, all rotating around a bright galactic core with a dark supermassive black hole at its center.
At over 100,000 light years across, the Milky Way is vast - but it is still just a small piece of what we can see. Zoom out further and you'll see a Local Group, with 30-50 small galaxies and a monster on a collision course: the Andromeda Galaxy. Twice the size of the Milky Way, Andromeda is speeding towards us.
We will collide in a few billion years, tearing each other apart before coalescing into one.
-...But when you zoom out even further, the impending collision of two galaxies seems inconsequential.
At the scale of millions of light-years, the structure of the Virgo Supercluster, a collection
of thousands of galaxies, becomes apparent. And dwarfing even that is the Laniakea Supercluster, hundreds of millions of light-years across, containing several other superclusters like our Virgo, which is itself part of the Pisces–Cetus
Supercluster Complex - a galactic filament almost a billion light years long.
And it is now that the cosmic web becomes visible. There are more filaments like our own, as well as great strings of superclusters.
There are also giant stretches of space with virtually nothing in them, like the Boötes
Void, an area 330 million light-years across in which we have discovered barely 60 galaxies.
An inkblot on the speckled sky.
-...Zooming out further, we finally reach the edge of the observable Universe, where primordial light has been travelling since nearly the beginning of time — 13.8 billion years — to reach our eyes. But since then, the Universe has expanded further, meaning that the true distance to the edge of the Universe is about 46 billion light years in one direction, meaning the full observable Universe is a sphere 93 billion light-years in diameter.
Structures any larger than a few billion light-years are hard to define with our current technology, partially because we are trying to map something we inhabit, and partially there may well be a limit - something scientists call The End Of Greatness.
But at every level up to this point — Planets, solar systems, galaxies, clusters, superclusters,
— the Universe is full of structure. It is not a random and chaotic jumble.
It seems organized. Yet the Universe started as a hot, dense soup of particles.
Why should it be structured? Why did that hot soup evolve into a Universe where some parts are filled with beautiful, sweeping arms of stars, while others are barren deserts?
And more importantly - how do we know?
[-...The year is 1502, and Nicolaus Copernicus should be studying medicine in Padua.
It is the center for medical education in Europe - all the best teachers and students gather there to learn how to heal the sick.]
[But Nicolaus is a polymath - he is learning medicine, but he's also reading Aristotle
and Plutarch and Plato, finding holes in Ptolemy's theories in his spare time.
Finishing his degree he returns home to Poland to work as a physician for his father. Though he doesn't forget about the cosmos - or our place in it.]
[And so it is a decade later that he writes a pamphlet outlining his now ubiquitous theory: we are not the center of the Universe. The Earth orbits the Sun, just like all the other planets. We are not special. Nicolaus knows the uproar this will cause, so he doesn't publish right away.]
[It's only in his 70th year — some say it's actually on his deathbed that he approves the first printed copy — that the book finally comes out.]
[And it shakes the very foundations of science, astronomy, philosophy, and religion - an idea
so dangerous and fantastical that its proponents would be prosecuted for decades after its
publication. The heretical notion that our Earth is just the third planet among many. At the time it was a shocking thought - but it marked only the beginning of a larger revelation.]
For if we're just some planet orbiting a random star, what does that make us?
Not special. It's a sad realization at first, but when we think deeper it opens up a world of possibilities.
If we're not special, what else is out there — who else is out there — to discover?
-...Known as the Copernican principle, this idea is now a bedrock of modern cosmology, and has two related tenets:
Earth is not special — we don't occupy some privileged position in the Universe.
, observations from the Earth should be relatively representative of observations from anywhere.
But, is this true? One modern day discovery that backed this up was the detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, or CMBR. A fuzzy background static, it permeates the sky, no matter which direction you look.
No matter how powerful your telescope, if you keep zooming in on a part of the sky with nothing in it, you will still detect faint microwave radiation - always with almost the same wavelength.
Emitted at a time close to the beginning of the Universe, at the moment when matter cooled down enough for protons to capture electrons and become clear gas, it is everywhere.
In this regard, our bit of the universe is clearly not special. Outer space, no matter which direction you look, has a temperature of about 2.7 degrees Kelvin. It doesn't matter if you are floating in outer space near the Milky Way or past distant Methusaleh, the average temperature of empty space is about the same. But there is an obvious issue with this - one that does not require a high-powered telescope to recognize.
Our cosmic address is full of huge structures: Galaxies, superclusters, great walls of stars
hundreds of millions of light-years across, and great voids with nothing in them.
The Universe clearly isn't totally uniform. We aren't special - but there are structures.
How can we reconcile these two ideas? All large-scale structure in the Universe can be explained by two opposing forces: expansion and gravity.
The Universe started hot and dense, and then underwent three phases of expansion.
The first lasted a fraction of a second and was extreme. This is called Inflation.
It then continued to expand in a second stage for several billion years at a more reasonable rate, cooling down, spreading out, and slowing its expansion.
And in the last few billion years, it has entered a third stage, in which expansion has accelerated again.
What is responsible for these shifting regimes of expansion? The initial inflation has been theorized to have been caused by a mysterious field called the inflaton, the latter expansion a mysterious energy so baffling it is simply known as "dark
energy".
- ...Clouds of dust and gas became stars, which clump into galaxies, and so on.
It was and is gravity doing what gravity does, at its most basic level.
Problem solved.
By combining data from different surveys, astronomers managed to define Laniakea, our local supercluster. This is our home — a group of thousands of galaxies all bound together by gravity.
And our universe maps are filled with many more fantastical places: Of course stretching out from our own Local Group of galaxies is the Virgo supercluster, whose tendrils connect into the Centaurus supercluster. Beyond that is the Perseus–Pisces Supercluster, and the South Pole Wall, which stretches across over a billion light years. And the Sloan Great Wall is about one billion light years in the other direction, an equally mammoth structure. And some astronomers believe that the milky way and a large part of Laniakea actually reside within another supermassive void, known as KBC - proposed to be almost 2 billion light years in diameter - though its existence is still hotly debated.
- ...At the largest scales, is the Universe like a meatball soup, a honeycomb, or a sponge?
A grizzled veteran sits in his office, contemplating about the Universe itself. "How did the large-scale structure of the Universe arise?", he asks himself.
Perhaps his contemplations would make him hungry for lunch.
On the other side of the world, a mild-mannered Professor sits in his office, contemplating the Universe. "How do tiny particles become huge galaxies?"
Similarly hunger-inducing thoughts.
So perhaps he wanders down to the cafeteria for a break.
As our methods of scanning the skies have improved and we have seen further back in time with increasing detail, something strange has been observed.
A phenomena referred to by some as The End Of Greatness.
At around a billion light years the universe finally becomes homogeneous, the same everywhere.
The large scale structure disappears.
Cosmologists can measure the shape of the Universe in two independent ways: First, they can count up all the mass and energy in the Universe and divide it by the "critical energy density" — the density at which the Universe would be flat. And they can also measure it geometrically, by measuring angles.
On a positively curved sphere, like the Earth, a triangle drawn on the surface will have angles that add up to more than 180 degrees.
- ...The 3D geometry of the Universe would be "closed" like this if it had more stuff in it.
Eventually, gravity would pull everything together into a Big Crunch. In a Universe with less stuff in it, expansion would continue forever and space would be hyperbolic: it would be like the inside surface of a donut. In a flat Universe, straight lines and angles make sense: triangles have angles that add up to 180 degrees. And results from both types of experiment show that what we have is a flat Universe, which is another point for inflation. And so this is strong evidence for the theory - but how then did inflation work to make the Universe we see? One of almost perfect homogeneity - but not exactly perfect?
-...Imagine a box with nothing in it. Close the lid so no light can get in.
Take all the air out with a pump and seal it. Cool it down to absolute zero.
Insulate it with lead so no radiation can penetrate. Is it empty?
No. The Universe is a fundamentally noisy place.
There is no such thing as a truly empty space.
/\\\\\
"Wow. Woah. I just realized that", Tom said as he continued listening to the documentary, wearing his earphones to immerse himself on the spectacle.
\\\\\/
-...Even if there were no matter inside the box, space is always permeated by quantum fields with different values at different positions. Some of those fields, like the Higgs field, give things mass.
Others, like the electromagnetic field, give things charge and carry light. One of the big discoveries of early modern physics — by the likes of Heisenberg, Einstein, and Planck — was the inherent noisiness of the Universe. There is uncertainty at the smallest scales, which shows up as a faint buzz in the quantum fields. At the quantum level, even "empty" space is filled with quantum fields whose values are varying randomly. But why is this important for the large scale structure of the universe?
To answer that question we have to go back to the very start.
In the beginning, the observable universe was hot, dense, and tiny.
The also tiny quantum fluctuations were buzzing along, with very small differences in the roiling patchwork of energy fields - as they do today on such small scales. And then, suddenly and dramatically - inflation: The observable universe rapidly expanded by 26 orders of magnitude in a tiny fraction of a second. Changes this extreme are hard to describe.
We don't have the words to properly conjure the scale of this explosion in our heads. 26 orders of magnitude is a grain of sand 1 millimeter across expanding to a septillion meters across. That's one hundred million light-years — something on the scale of Laniakea.
/\\\\\
By this time, Tom was beginning to get a bit tired, but his curiosity kept him from being drowsy, at least for a while.
\\\\\\/
- ...Galaxies would tend to be fairly close together because of the clumping effect of gravity. And so you should be less and less likely to find two galaxies separated by larger distances.
But this is not what astronomers see. When they do this kind of analysis they observe one peak for galaxies that are close together — as expected — and another one for a separation of about 150 megaparsecs.
For hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang, it was too hot for atomic nuclei to capture electrons.
The universe was a sea of charged particles, and photons of light couldn't travel in straight lines.
They would get bounced around, scattering in every direction until they hit the next stray electron. As it cooled, some of the regions that were more dense would pull more and more stuff in. But photons exert a pressure when they get too close together, and this pressure would push out, carrying some matter with it.
And this is where Dark Matter entered the picture. Dark Matter outweighs regular matter in the Universe by five times.
It was, and remains, the dominant gravitational force in our Universe.
/\\\\\
Tom was starting to become a bit uncoordinated by this time, him almost dropping his phone while listening to the closing remarks of the documentary itself.
\\\\\\/
- ...Where are you? The Observable Universe, Laniakea, Virgo Supercluster, Local Group, Milky Way, Orion Arm Local Cavity, Local Interstellar Cloud, Oort Cloud, Solar System, Earth.
At every scale, there is structure, there is order. This structure is governed by simple principles — gravity, which is dominated by Dark Matter, and expansion, which is now driven by Dark energy but which at one stage was the result of inflation. And yet these principles turn matter and energy into huge, beautiful structures, bathed in the warm glow of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. Every scientist and the teams that supported them have brought us this far in uncovering its secrets.
And yet, despite all that we know, there are still mysteries, out there,
written in the stars.
/End of Transcript/
- Transcription Process Finished. []
-Tom became very tired for a while. []
- Sheesh, that was a mouthful of information to take in, Tom would be surprised if he understood everything he heard at all. []
- Tom felt very, very tired. []
- Tom decided to rest for a while. []
After he finished watching the documentary, he decided to withhold himself as he kept his phone on his lap and rested his head and body against the Tree, feeling a long-deserved feeling of content that he rarely experiences, considering of how numerous their missions have with his Pokémon children being there by his side.
He really, really needed to rest for now.
Author's Notes:
In a certain day in November, Tom listens to a documentary that caught his attention on his phone about the cosmos' inner workings, as his Pokémon inside his house were doing their nightly chores under his sight.
Probably and perhaps this could be informative and useful someday.
Maybe.
And it wouldn't be before long that they'd be done and run towards him and do what they always do... cuddle their Papa for the night.
Pokémon belongs to GameFreak/Nintendo
