A Quote by Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain



Telescopes are in some ways like time machines...
They reveal galaxies so far away that their light has taken billions of years to reach us. We in astronomy have an advantage in studying the universe, in that we can actually see the past. We owe our existence to stars, because they make the atoms of which we are formed. So if you are romantic you can say we are literally starstuff. If you're less romantic you can say we're the nuclear waste from the fuel that makes stars shine. We've made so many advances in our understanding. A few centuries ago, the pioneer navigators learnt the size and shape of our Earth, and the layout of the continents. We are now just learning the dimensions and ingredients of our entire cosmoc, and can at last make some sense of our cosmic habitat.



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Sunday, March 1, 2009

Universe Calandar - We were born just a minute ago!

Carl Sagan ( 1934-96 ), an American astronomer, first suggested a 'cosmic calendar' as a way of helping people understand the history of Universe. He assumed the total duration of Universe as 1 year(365 days) and scaled every event that happened in this Universe into that 1 year, starting from the Big Bang happening at 00.00 hrs on the 1st of January.

Here are the list of events one after the other...

1 Jan (00.00 hrs) - Big Bang - Universe forms.
15 March - First stars and galaxies form
1 May - Milky Way galaxy forms
8 Sep - Sun forms
9 Sep - Solar system forms
12 Sep - Earth forms
13 Sep - Moon forms
20 Sep - Earth atmoshere forms
1 Oct - Earliest known life on earth
7 Oct - Earliest known fossile
18 Dec - First many celled life forms
19 Dec - First fish
21 Dec - First land plants ; first insect
23 Dec - First reptiles
24 Dec - First Dinosaur
26 Dec - First mammal
27 Dec - First bird
28 Dec - First flowering plant
28 Dec - Dinosaurs extinct
31 Dec (11:55PM) - Homo sapiens, humans appear.
31 Dec (11:59PM) - Modern Humans continue to live.

Facinating as it is... the lifespan of an average human being is not even 1 millionth of second, when compared to the gigantic life span of our Universe!

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