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Most of the Indians are familiar with horoscopes. For many, despite their educational, professional, and religious background, they are curious to get their child’s horoscope written by Pandits or astrologers. Anxiety to know about the baby’s future is not the only reason for writing the baby’s horoscope. They believe that they could do some course correction in the destiny of their baby by taking timely action as per the informed advice of the astrologers.
How do these pandits write Jataka? They first create a unique astrological birth chart of the baby by mapping the position of the celestial bodies (the sun, planets, etc.) at the exact moment and location of birth of the baby. They then interpret the effect and influence of these celestial bodies on the life of the baby from the chart. Many believe that at the time of creation, those celestial bodies were placed in their position by God and will remain there, influencing the lives of humans, forever.
But science says that these celestial bodies also have a birth, a life span, and a death. Yes, there was an Indian scientist who could write the horoscopes of stars. His name was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, fondly called as Chandra, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his theory called the Chandrasekhar limit, which predicts the destiny of a star. We will look into it later in the second part of this story.
Unlike what religions say, many scientists believe that the universe in its present form started off with the Big Bang. Science is unable to comprehend anything about the state of the universe till the moment of the Big Bang. There was no time and space up to the moment of the Big Bang, as time and space started only from the moment of the Big Bang. The entire mass of the universe we see around today was confined to a single point, the singularity, with infinite density and temperature, and nil volume. As there is no explanation for such a state of the universe, its origin, and what caused the Big Bang, the Big Bang is believed to be a divine act by God.
Here comes an important question. Is the Big Bang just a theory, or is there any experimental evidence to prove that it actually happened? Fortunately, there are.
- The universe, immediately after the Big Bang, was in a state of energy-dominated particles. (We are talking about a very short time span, like one trillionth of a second.) One such particle is the Higgs Boson. It is also called God Particles. (Actually, it has nothing to do with God or religion.) This name has come from the word goddamn particles because of their highly unstable state. One way of proving the Big Bang theory is to recreate the collision of particles as happened at the Big Bang and detect the Higgs Boson particle, if any, that are created after the collision. Scientists did it in the CERN laboratory on the Switzerland–France border in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), by colliding protons at nearly the speed of light. Higgs bosons produced after collision were actually detected by a detector, thus proving the possibility of the occurrence of the Big Bang.
(But here comes another important question. If the universe were all energy radiation, how could the universe, comprising heavy galaxies and stars and planets, be formed? Luckily, science has an answer.
The space is filled with an invisible energy field, named the Higgs field. When particles move through this field, they gain mass. Consider a simple analogy. Imagine a person is walking along the riverside. Then he goes into the river and tries to walk through the riverbed in hip-deep water. Here, he will find that his movement is slowed down compared to his walk along the riverside. Conversely, when a fundamental particle like an electron, quarks, and others moves through the Higgs field, it will gain rest mass. Without this field, all these fundamental particles would move at the speed of light, and they could never form atoms. Now, let us see what gives mass to ordinary matter like protons and neutrons. Their mass comes from another field named the Gluon field and the motion of quarks and gluons inside. A quark is the fundamental building block of matter. A proton is made up of three quarks. So the total mass of the universe is the sum of the Higgs field, the Gluon field &motion of quarks and dark matter/energy.)
2. The most direct evidence of the Big Bang is the detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). It took about 3,80,000 years for the universe to cool sufficiently to form atoms and also to become transparent to light again after the photon epoch phase mentioned below.
So, the light which had been trapped in the fog of plasma till such time was suddenly able to travel freely. That light is still around us as the CMB, which was first discovered in 1965. The CMB’s temperature pattern (represented by different colors in the picture) matches the predictions of the Big Bang models accurately.
3. Red shift of galaxies indicating expansion of the universe, which is proved through the Hubble telescope, is a demonstration of the Big Bang theory.
4. The Big Bang theory predicts only the existence of hydrogen and helium in the ratio 75 to 25, with traces of Lithium in the early universe. The study of the oldest stars proved their presence in the same ratio.
5. Modern Sky survey of galaxies shows that the distribution of galaxies in space matches a computer-stimulated image of the universe based on the Big Bang.
It is fascinating to know what happened after the Big Bang.
Quark epoch phase. This is the first phase after the Big Bang, which lasted up to a period “as long as” one hundred thousandth of a second. During this phase, the universe was filled with dense and extremely hot quark-gluon plasma, containing quarks (the fundamental building block of the universe), leptons, and their antiparticles. The energy level of these particles was so high that they remained independent in a plasma state.
Hadron epoch phase. This period lasted ,up to one second after the Big Bang. By this time period of one second, the universe expanded and cooled considerably so that the energy of the fundamental particles fell below the binding energy of hadrons, baryons, and Mesons, which are composite particles made up of quarks bound by the strong nuclear force.
Lepton epoch phase. This phase lasted from the first second up to ten seconds after the Big Bang. During this phase, newly formed hadrons and antihadrons were annihilated, leaving leptons and anti-leptons (particles like electrons and positrons) to dominate the universe with the remaining quarks. Electrons and positrons continued to collide and annihilate, releasing energy as photons.
Photon epoch phase. During this phase, the energy of the universe became dominated by photons. The universe was filled with a dense plasma of protons and electrons, and other charged particles, and the universe was opaque as photons scattered off all charged particles. The universe continued to expand and cool, and this phase lasted up to 3,80,000 years after the Big Bang.
Radiation to Matter domination. (Recombination/decoupling phase) With the universe cooling to 3000K, electrons were able to combine with the light atomic nuclei and form neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium. This recombination made the universe transparent to light, and matter began to overtake radiation as the dominant component of the universe. The photons that were released during this era are still travelling through space, even today. We can observe them as Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation.
From 3,80,000 to a few million years, the universe was filled only with hydrogen and helium, and this era is called the dark ages, as there was no source of light from stars. Tiny density fluctuations in this universe (as observed in CMB) caused gravitational collapse to form .
Population III, II, and I stars, chemical enrichment, birth of planets, and satellites. By 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang, dark matter halos, under their own gravity, collapsed, which led to the birth of massive stars, called population III stars, made up of hydrogen and helium. These massive stars, which collapsed under their own gravity, exploded (supernova), and, through fusion, created heavier elements than helium, like carbon, oxygen. Etc. This process is called chemical enrichment. This paved the way for the creation of the next generation of stars (population II and eventually population I stars, like our sun). Around new stars, leftover materials formed a rotating disc called a protoplanetary disk. Over millions of years, these disks evolved into planets orbiting their parent star. Satellites may be regarded as children of planets evolved from mini protoplanetary discs formed just like planets did around stars.
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First Galaxies. Over several hundred million years, dark matter halos continued to merge and collapse, creating new stars, and the aggregation process gave birth to numerous protogalaxies. The intense ultraviolet light emitted by these stars and galaxies started ionizing the hydrogen atoms and marked the end of the dark ages, and over a billion years, the universe became transparent to light again.
Galaxy evolution. Early galaxies were small and numerous. Through a continuous process of mergers, they evolved to massive spiral galaxies (forms as gas clouds settled into rotating discs) like the Milky Way and elliptical galaxies (from the merger of two or more large galaxies), which we see today.
Now we have a fair idea about how the Big Bang gave birth to the Galaxies and Stars. Let us discuss the life of stars and their end, correctly predicted by Chandra, in the next part.
(To be continued…….)
Audio Credits – The Burning Ghat by Rishab Rikhiram Sharma
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