#30DaysofScikuChallenge
The Big Bang
Day 7 Prompt: Astronomy Inspired Sciku
red-shift blue-shift
the farther apart, farther the move
expansion much?
Let’s kick off the New Year with a Bang — Big Bang — that is!
The Big Bang Theory is the leading explanation about how and roughly when the universe began. Simplistically — it states that the universe as we know it started with a small singularity, then inflated over the next 13.8 billion years to the cosmos that we know today.
Look up in the sky, and it is easy to get inspired — scientists have long studied a way to measure vast distances in space. At the turn of the last century, when women were not even allowed to operate telescopes and more generally considered suited only for boring and rote work of data analysis — a researcher who provided one of the biggest keys to solving astronomical distance scale problem was a deaf woman, Henrietta Swan Leavitt.
Her initial observations on a particular type of pulsating stars called Cepheid Variables, and her meticulous analysis eventually led to a remarkable finding by Astronomer Edwin Hubble — All of the galaxies in the universe appeared to be moving away from our planet, and each other and the farther a galaxy was, the faster it was receding — known as Hubble’s law.
Hubble’s law uses a unit that describes how fast the universe is expanding at different distances from a particular point in space called Hubble’s constant. It is one of the keystones in our understanding of the universe’s evolution — and researchers have debated over its true value since when it was first defined.
Recent studies using known distances of 50 galaxies from Earth to refine calculations in Hubble’s constant, a research team led by a University of Oregon astronomer has further refined its value. The most recent estimates place the universe's age at 12.6 billion years.
12.6 billion years or 13.8 billion years— an astronomical time frame indeed — Sure, 2020 felt like it went on forever and ever — but alas, it was just a speck in the cosmological quest — here’s hoping we make a significant and meaningful impact in 2021 — Happy New Year!
**This is Day 7 of the #sciku challenge — science-inspired haiku ( so #sciku?) prompts to get you inspired — Our dear readers — why not spend some time each day creating and having a little fun — if you do — publish it anywhere on medium, just tag it with — #30DaysOfScikuChallenge.
**If Haikus/SciKus are not your thing, feel free to exercise your artistic creativity and write another form of a science-inspired story — I can’t wait to read what you come up with.
Tagging kurt gasbarra Kasun Ranasinghe Jim McAulay🍁 Dana Sanford John Levin, and anyone else who feels inspired to follow and/or play along with this fun #30DaysOfScikuChallenge and today’s prompt: Astronomy
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