the.com/cosmology
the audacious attempt to explain everything that exists by staring really hard at old light.
means The branch of science and philosophy that studies the origin, structure, and ultimate fate of the universe as a whole.
from From Greek 'kosmos' — meaning 'order,' 'arrangement,' and by extension the well-ordered world itself — joined to '-logia,' 'the study of.' That same 'kosmos' gives us 'cosmetic,' since the Greeks saw beauty as a matter of pleasing arrangement; so cosmology and cosmetics are distant relatives, one tidying the face of the universe, the other the face of a person. The compound 'cosmology' itself entered the European learned vocabulary fairly late, around the 18th century, as scholars carved up the grand sciences into named disciplines.
- oldest light
- Cosmic background radiation is 13.8 billion years old
- mostly mystery
- 95 percent of the universe is dark and unexplained
- expanding faster
- The universe accelerates outward, reason still unknown
- static screen
- Some TV static is leftover Big Bang glow
- flat geometry
- Measurements show the universe is suspiciously, perfectly flat
cosmic microwave background — radiation from 380,000 years after the big bang, mapped by wmap and planck satellites
hubble deep field — 1995 image of 3,000 galaxies in a tiny patch of sky, showing universe's depth and age
lambda-cdm model — standard model of cosmology accounting for dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter (96% unknown)