no but really

I mean except for the hydrogen in you. that came from the dawn of time itself

this chart changed my fucking life

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

@starwall I remember wondering about this years ago and assuming that antimatter had positive mass but wasn't sure--and upon looking it up, they hadn't actually managed to prove it yet! I saw an Ars Technica article about this come across my RSS reader recently, and was...honestly relieved to hear that they had finally settled it in more or less the expected way, even if antimatter having negative mass would have been extremely exciting for a bunch of reasons (I'm looking at you, Alcubierre drives)