ᔅᑕᕐᐗᓪwe are all stardust
no but really
I mean except for the hydrogen in you. that came from the dawn of time itself
you are 10% hydrogen by mass. all of it is leftovers from the raw energy of the explosive first moment of the universe
the very same hydrogen in the water in your blood, that hydrogen. all of it formed in the immediate first seconds of creation. it took nearly 400,000 years for it to cool down enough to become an actual gas as opposed to a dense hot plasma, and literally the entirety of time more to finally end up in the water you drank today
we have not really had much time with this information, specifically we hadn't observed a neutron star collision until august of 2017.
we are getting far better and more precise at doing astronomy and as we get lucky and observe more we begin to understand the processes that brought us to where we are now, and its absurd, it is an absurd history and it's phenomenal
the very stars themselves died so we may live
it's rad and it's beautiful and fuck if that doesn't make me feel things
The gravitational wave background was just discovered, on june 28th of this year
it is TWICE as noisy as we first predicted
we don't know why
we are figuring it out
as our instruments become better and we build more gravitational wave detectors we will be able to better triangulate the origins of these waves in the sky, and eventually we may be able to filter out all of the noise from more recent black hole mergers and be able to listen to the primordial reverberations of the big bang itself still rippling through all of spacetime. we will be able to peer back deeper into time than ever before, and finally begin to answer some profound questions about the first moment of creation
It SHOULDN'T work, logically there's no part about gravitational wave astronomy that makes any sense. Surely if you're IN space, you wouldn't be able to build any sort of contraption that can detect it bending since the contraption itself would bend imperceptibly with space, and YET
we answered a pretty big question just TODAY. Anti-matter experimentally interacts with gravity in exactly the same way as matter. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06527-1
and like you're probably like "oh, antihydrogen falls just like everything else, big whoop" but like this is a huge thing. because. we don't know why anything exists
in the first moment of creation, not JUST hydrogen (protons) but also electrons and in equal amounts positrons and anti-protons were ALSO created by this quantum clusterfuck of a bunch of energy desperately trying to state change down into anything that made a lick of sense
Jasper 🍉@starwall protons weren't created, since their constitutuent quarks would be unbound on that energy.
I reckon we don't know if equal amount of matter and antimatter was created at the start of our universe, theory may say so, but we don't know if the theory is correct in that regime.
Probably relevant that gravitational waves were detected using careful observation pulsar timings, detecting far longer wavelengths than the LIGO and other laser interferometry observatories.