BIG BANG THEORY

"The evolution of the world can be compared to a display of fireworks that has just ended; some few red wisps, ashes and smoke. Standing on a cooled cinder, we see the slow fading of the suns, and we try to recall the vanishing brilliance of the origin of the worlds." Lemaitre

An overwhelming weight of evidence has convinced cosmologists that the universe came into existence at a definite moment in time, some 13 billion years ago, in the form of a superhot, super dense fireball of energetic radiation. This is known as the Big Bang theory. Until the arrival of the Big Bang theory the universe was believed to be essentially eternal and unchanging, represented by the Steady State model. The first clear hint that the universe might change as time passes came in 1917 when Albert Einstein developed his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein realised that his equations said that the universe must be either expanding or contracting, but it could not be standing still, because if it were then gravity would attract all the galaxies towards one another. This was, at the time, a revolutionary concept, so revolutionary that Einstein refused to believe it and introduced his infamous 'cosmological constant' into the equations so that the sums agreed that the universe could be static. He later claimed it was the biggest blunder of his career. It was in 1920 that Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding by measuring the light from distant galaxies. This discovery was followed in 1927 by Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian astronomer, who was the first person to produce a version of what is now known as the Big Bang model.

It is necessary to understand that the Big Bang did not begin as a huge explosion within the universe, the Big Bang created the universe. A popular misconception is that it happened within the universe and that it is expanding through it. This causes people to wonder where in the universe it started, as if by running the clock backwards we would reach the point where all the galaxies come together in the centre of the universe. The universe does not have a centre, any more than the surface of a sphere has a centre, and there is no preferred place that could be termed the centre. I know this sounds odd, it must have a centre, mustn't it? The problem we have here is we are trying to visualise the universe in the standard 3 dimensions that we are familiar with and therefore expect to find a centre to an expanding sphere. The universe, however, is not an expanding 3 dimensional sphere; it contains also the dimension of time and many other dimensions as well. By way of an illustration imagine a balloon with dots painted on the surface to represent the galaxies. If the balloon is now inflated we can see that all the dots are moving away from one another, just as the galaxies are in the real universe, and we can also see that on the surface of the balloon there is no centre point from which all the galaxies are moving away from. I am not suggesting that we exist on the 'outside' of an expanding bubble, only that we cannot visualise the entire expanding universe.

(Copied from : http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/The%20Big%20Bang%20Theory.htm )

Large Hadron Collider Hits Successfully The Big Bang Theory

By NIMY Sara Joy

March 30 — The most challengeable experiment successfully completed, inside a 17-mile tunnel below the border of Switzerland and France at Geneva. It was the most worrying time in science that the experiment with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for reproducing the conditions instantly after the Big Bang.

By crashing proton beams into each other, the LHC could make a record for high energy collisions today. The crashing proton beams was at three times extra power than ever before. For the milestone experiment $ 10 billion was spent.

This experiment is bringing answer to why Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and about theoretical particles and micro forces. It will be a breakthrough in science and scientists’ effort to recognize the foundation of the universe. The experiment was done at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator at CERN, the European Particle Physics laboratory in Cressy near Geneva.

The scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN captured measurements at a mixed energy level of 7 trillion electron volts.

The Big Bang is the cosmological model of the primary environment and following expansion of the Universe that is supported by the most inclusive and precise explanations from contemporary scientific evidence and study. As used by cosmologists, the term Big Bang generally refers to the idea that the Universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some restricted time in the past and continues to expand to this day.

“Experiments are collecting their first physics data — historic moment here!” a scientist tweeted on CERN’s official Twitter account.

“Nature does it all the time with cosmic rays (and with higher energy) but this is the first time this is done in Laboratory!” said another tweet.

(Copied from : http://www.dailynews365.com/technology-news/large-hadron-collider-hits-successfully-the-big-bang-theory/ )

2012 may bring the “perfect storm” – solar flares, systems collapse

2012 may bring the “perfect storm” – solar flares, systems collapse

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More perfect storm: the hole in the earth’s magnetic field

According to a December 16, 2008 report, NASA’s THEMIS spacecraft has discovered a hole in earth’s magnetic field which is 10 times as large as previously thought. The magnetosphere, which is designed to protect earth from the plasma of solar flares, now has a hole in it four time the size of the earth.

According to the NASA report, “Northern IMF events don't actually trigger geomagnetic storms but they do set the stage for storms by loading the magnetosphere with plasma. A loaded magnetosphere is primed for auroras, power outages, and other disturbances that can result when, say, a CME (coronal mass ejection) hits.”

The solar maximum is expected in 2012. University of New Hampshire scientist Jimmy Raeder states, “"We're entering Solar Cycle 24. For reasons not fully understood, CMEs in even-numbered solar cycles (like 24) tend to hit Earth with a leading edge that is magnetized north. Such a CME should open a breach and load the magnetosphere with plasma just before the storm gets underway. It's the perfect sequence for a really big event."

What is Magnetosphere?

(copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere)

A magnetosphere is formed when a stream of charged particles, such as the solar wind, interacts with and is deflected by the intrinsic magnetic field of a planet or similar body. Earth is surrounded by a magnetosphere, as are the other planets with intrinsic magnetic fields: Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Jupiter's moon Ganymede has a small magnetosphere — but it is situated entirely within the magnetosphere of Jupiter, leading to complex interactions. The ionospheres of weakly magnetized planets such as Venus and Mars set up currents that partially deflect the solar wind flow, but do not have magnetospheres, per se.