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

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

all of this energy turning into matter like the particles being created by a particle accelerator when you throw a proton at another proton with the force of a softball going 80 milles an hour--all that kinetic energy has to turn into SOMETHING so the universe just spawns a shitload of weird particles, nearly all of which just exist for just an instant before they spontaneously decay because most of them aren't even quite stable

an interesting part about this process is that matter and antimatter are created equally in the collisions, this is in fact, how we made the anti-hydrogen in the first place.

the big bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, all of which should have annihilated. and indeed that's what happened: all of which did, except for a VERY small remainder.

for every 10 billion particles of antimatter that were created, 10,000,000,001 particles of matter were created.

every single atom is that remainder.

the question is: why was there an imbalance

What caused the material universe to well, exist? We don't know. Perhaps antimatter interacts sliiiiiightly differently with the laws of physics than matter does. If it experienced gravity in a slightly different manner that could possibly tell us one such asymmetry, but no such luck

so the question remains: why does anything exist at all when it Should have exploded

anyways that's the story of all of the hydrogen in you