Maddy Monty

The Stars and the Universe

Have you ever looked up into the sky on a clear night and thought to yourself, “How far
away are the stars?” “How and where did the universe start?” While there is no real simple way
to explain these things, there is still a way to understand the science behind it all. I researched
and found information on the Big Bang Theory, the first elements that were emitted from the Big
Bang and what the red shift is, why it is so important and what we use its information for. While
researching, I learned many interesting things that changed the way I look at our universe; there
are so many spectacular theories that will make you think critically and want to dig even deeper.
I hope that my paper does the same for you, that you are intrigued and challenged by the
concepts that I will be presenting.
When most people hear ‘The Big Bang’ they think of the
classic science comedy that everyone loves, but that is not
what I will be explaining here - sadly. I will be exploring
the very beginning of our universe. According to scientists,
the universe was born as a very hot, very dense, single point
in space. Cosmologists are unsure what happened before this
moment, but with space missions, telescopes and
complicated calculations, scientists have been working to
reveal the very starting point of how our universe was
created. The Big Bang, as described by scientists, was an
explosion of a singularity in space that created the world and
matter we know today. This explosion happened about 13.7
billion years ago. After roughly a hundredth of a billionth of
a trillionth of a trillionth of a second our world began to
grow tremendously. During this burst of expansion, which
is known as inflation, the universe grew drastically and doubled in size at least 90 times; as it
continued to expand the temperature steadily cooled and the universe became less dense.
Light chemical elements were created in the first three minutes of our
universe’s formation. As the universe expanded, temperatures cooled and
protons and neutrons collided to make deuterium (which is an isotope of
hydrogen). A lot of this deuterium combined to make helium. Moreover our solar
system is estimated to have been born a little after 9 billion years after the Big
Bang, making it about 4.6 billion years old. Current estimates state that the sun is
one of more than 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and orbits roughly
25,000 light-years from the galactic core. Many scientists believe our solar
system and our sun were formed from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust
known as the solar nebula (as seen in the picture to the right). As gravity caused
the nebula to collapse, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. During these changes, most of the
existing matter was pulled toward the center creating the sun. From these extreme changes came
Earth and everything we know today. Even though scientists are yet to find more information to
build the blocks up to how we got here today, they have a pretty great start.

One theory of the Big Bang is that it created all of the natural elements we have today.
During the first stages of our universe, only light chemicals were formed, like hydrogen and
helium. Later on, different atoms were made by adding one nucleon at a time to the nucleus,
before the process was stopped when the universe became too cool. Alpher and Gamow with a
little help from Bethe, set out a vision of the early
universe in which all matter was a highly compressed
“soup” of neutrons, some of which were able to
escape and decay into protons and electrons as the
universe expanded and became less dense. They
believed that these new protons could then capture
neutrons, together making deuterium nuclei — an
isotope of hydrogen that has one proton and one neutron. They then created a theory that all that
had to be done to create heavier nuclei was the capture of another nucleon. But it’s a little more
complicated than that. Their idea works for elements up to helium — and does produce hydrogen
and helium, which together make up 99% of the matter in the universe — but it fails when you
try to put five nucleons together. There is no stable isotope of any element that has five nucleons.
Alpher’s and Gamow’s theory relied on using each element as a stepping stone to the next, so it
was stopped in its tracks by this piece of information.

“Timeline of the expansion of

the universe. The light
elements were created on the
far left of this diagram at the
beginning of the universe, and
became neutral atoms at
around 380,000 years after the
big bang.”
Credit: NASA/WMAP
Science Team
 One of the most interesting and (in my opinion) important questions about our universe
and the Big Bang is, How do we know if our universe is still expanding, and to go off of that,
what is the red shift? Scientists use the red shift and the blue shift to interpret if the universe is
still expanding, how far away a star is from earth and if a star or planet is in orbit. Think of the
red shift as ‘The Doppler Effect’ experienced in sound waves. The Doppler Effect: You are in a
car and a police car with its sirens wailing is far behind you. You faintly hear the sirens then as
the car approaches it rises in pitch. Until it is right next to you, at its loudest. Then as it
continues to pass by and get further the sirens lower in pitch. Now you might be thinking “Well
how does a police car have anything to do with a star?” it is similar because light behaves closely
to sound. Instead of sound changing its pitch, the color of the light it emits changes by a very
small amount, depending on if the object is moving away from us or towards us.

The first step in the explanation of red shift is a look at the color spectrum. In the picture
above, you can see what looks like a rainbow. The colors start at red on the left side of the
picture and go all the way to blue on the right side. This graphic shows the entire range of what
are called visible colors. Colors have a pitch, just like sound does. The red end of the spectrum
has a lower pitch, or frequency, and the blue end of the spectrum has a higher pitch. If you think
of it in sound terms, the red colors would be the low notes on a piano, and the blue colors would
be the high notes. Sound and light behave in the same way.

If a star is moving closer to us, the light it gives off gets squeezed together, which makes
it appear bluer than it actually is. If the star is moving away from us, the light gets stretched out,
which makes it appear more red than it really is, and if the star is also going faster, or
accelerating, this effect is even greater. Once we found this out, scientists were able to determine
whether a star is moving towards us or further away by if the light is "blue shifted" or "red
shifted." If the light is "red shifted" the star is moving away from us; if it is "blue shifted", it is
moving closer. After they have calculated how much the light is shifted, either towards red or
blue, scientists can then calculate how far away the object is and how fast it is moving either
towards or away from us. Of course, making these measurements is little trickier than just
saying “that star looks redder than it should be.” Instead, astronomers make use of markers in
the ​spectrum​ of starlight. If you shine a flashlight through a prism, a rainbow comes out

the other side. But if you place a clear container filled with hydrogen gas
between the flashlight and the prism, the rainbow changes. Gaps appear
in the spectrum of colors, places where the light literally goes missing
and blank lines are left behind. When we pass the starlight through a
prism (or similar device), we see a ton of absorption lines from hydrogen,
helium, sodium, and many more. However, if that star is shifting away
from us, all those absorption lines move towards the red part of the
spectrum. But if the star is shifting towards us, the opposite happens: the
absorption lines fall towards the blue shift. By measuring how far the
pattern of lines moves from where it’s supposed to be, scientists can
calculate the speed of the star compared to Earth. This tool opens up
many more questions for astronomers to contemplate about our stars and
the universe.
Scientists have been answering questions about the way our
universe works for decades. With every answer we get closer and closer
to the complete explanation. The Big Bang, how all of our elements came to be plus the red and
blue shift have been considerable stepping stones to this final answer. Even though some of the
theories can be challenging to understand, once you can grasp the concepts it is very easy to see
how they all make sense. At the beginning of this paper I was having a hard time understanding
what all of it meant, but with a lot of research and reading I found this really interesting and fun,
especially the red shift.
Bibliography

Writer, Denise Chow SPACE.com Staff. “The Universe: Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy
Steps.”​Space.com​, ​www.space.com/13320-big-bang-universe-10-steps-explainer.html​.

Oakes, Kelly. “On the Origin of Chemical Elements.” ​Scientific American Blog Network​,
2 Aug.2011,
blogs.scientificamerican.com/basic-space/httpblogsscientificamericancombasic-space20110802o
n-the-origin-of-chemical-elements/.

“ .” ​THE BIG BANG​,

u​ mich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm.

“How Do Scientists Know the Universe Is Expanding?” ​How Do Scientists Know the
Universe Is Expanding? - Quora​,
www.quora.com/How-do-scientists-know-the-universe-is-expanding.

Cool Cosmos​,
coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/cosmic_reference/redshift.html.

Astronomy for Kids - Red Shift​,

​ ww.dustbunny.com/afk/skywonders/redshift/.
w

“What Is a Redshift?” ​EarthSky​,

earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/what-is-a-redshift​.