Eugenio, Gian Christian V.

151658 BS MGT
Jallorina
Physics 1 - C
2016

Reaction Paper
Mr. Michael
16 March
The Origin of Us

The space, what a very fantastic place to look and observe. A magnificent scene on its
own. This beauty is like a painting in the sky that took millions of years to finish to look this
gorgeous. But do you not wonder the origin of space? According to the movie BBCs Horizon
| Cosmic Dawn: The Real Moment of Creation, big bang did not start it at all, it was merely a
laying of egg, the moment universe really hatched was when the first star was born, the
climax of the cosmic dark ages, the beginning of the cosmic dawn.
According to an article in time magazine, Astronomers call it the cosmic dawn, and
its nearly as poetic as it sounds. This is the time, a few hundred million years after the Big
Bang, when the first stars and galaxies burst into existence, bringing light to the cosmos and
putting an end to the period known, just as evocatively, as the dark ages. (Lemonick 2012)
According to that statement, the big bang is what started it all, but when the singularity or the
cosmic microwave background exploded, it did not pop out planes or stars or galaxies, it just
had a dense bright beginning and later on released vast fogs of hydrogen around the the
universe. Right after the big bang is what we call the cosmic dark ages. The cosmic dark ages
happened years after the big bang, when the explosion occurred, heat and radiation scattered
all throughout the universe but moments after the explosion, it began to cool and whats left
is a very high amount of hydrogen molecules scattered around the universe. It made the
whole universe a boring, dark and opaque universe full of hydrogen fog. These hydrogen fogs
in which the molecular density is very low or diffuse that its 1 hydrogen molecule in about
every 90,000 kilometer. But after millions of years, cosmic dawn happened, gravitational
singularity occurred and started pulling the hydrogen molecules together. After years of
gravitational effect, the compressed hydrogen bonds became so hot and pressurized that it
triggered nuclear fusion. From there, it started a storm and formed the first star ever born.
This is the true birth or the kick starter of the universe today. The star made was so big
and so hot that its mass is a hundred times it would be than the sun and twenty times hotter
and ten million times more luminous than the sun. Right after this is the aforementioned
chain reaction which lead to many massive stars. It accelerated, exponentially that almost
every couple of years, a star was born. Imagine a firework display in a cloudy night.
After a couple of millions of years, these stars, after a lifetime forging many elements
such as iron, gold and silver, will eventually run out of fuel and explode into the vast universe
pushing the surrounding hydrogen fogs or using them to the next star who is going to be born
in the old stars debris. This process can be also called as cosmic recycling. According to
Nicholas Hewitt, star formation is initiated by disturbances of equilibrium within molecular
clouds forces from outside the cloud may cause additional compression of the gas and dust.
Such compression can be the result of shockwaves from local supernova explosions. From
here, we can infer that stars live by the three Rs specifically the recycle one in which stars
are easier to be made because of the forged heavy elements in its core that it can store more
heat than the older ones.

The scientist, in this video, discovered many things. One is the first star, one is the
oldest star man has ever seen, and many more. But these scientists just dont use random
equipment to discover these scientific breakthroughs. They dedicated their life to it and used
some expensive equipment that I will never be able to afford. One good example and the
most common equipment they used is the telescope. The telescope they used is very different
from the consumer grade telescope. Consumer grade telescopes are small, affordable, and we
can imagine them as those white, pipe-looking telescopes with tripods. These consumer grade
telescopes can only reach a certain distance like the distance from here to the moon but the
telescopes that these scientist, particularly the astronomers, are not just some minor league
ones, its the real-deal major league telescopes. The telescopes that these scientist use are
massive and cannot just be used as is. These are machine operated telescopes connected to
computers because its really not operated using lenses. One good example is the Skymapper
telescope located in Siding Spring Observatory in Australia and the Hubble telescope located
in space. Telescopes have many types, there are optical, x-ray, radio, gamma-ray, etc. but in
this video, its not just telescope that they used to discover the origin of the universe. The
astronomers also used supercomputers to generate images of something that is too far away
for our telescopes to reach, the first star.
Radio waves, as seen in the last part of the movie, was defined as a very relevant part
of finding out the origin of the universe. Professor Steven Tingay said in the movie that
hydrogen can store radio waves. If what he said was true, we all know that right after the big
bang, vast amounts of hydrogen atoms were scattered around the universe, therefore if his
radio telescope get to capture one in its range, we may actually see glimpse of the cosmic
dark age. There are some conflicts, though. First, he needs radio waves from the hydrogen
molecules but these frequencies are about the same frequency as that of our modern day
equipment such as television, fm and am radios, and many other things. This gives his
telescopes some restrictions as to where to put it. It should be isolated and away from all of
the technology. The second and hopefully the last conflict he may have ever to encounter is
that after the explosion of the stars, the vast hydrogen fogs are turned into bubbles as said
in the movie but the hydrogen molecules that have the ability to contain certain amount of
radio waves are that of the molecules that came from the fog. This means that it is very hard
to find such hydrogen cloud due to the fact that they may already be completely gone. Lets
hope not.
Although the stars that may have lived way from the cosmic dawn have already died,
these technologies that we have today may have a chance to catch a glimpse, even just a
glimpse of the past because it really is amazing and enlightening to know where you came
from.
References:
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?
2002JBAA..112..201H&defaultprint=YES&filetype=.pdf
http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_bigbang_timeline.html
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gravitational+force
http://science.time.com/2012/12/14/cosmic-dawn-hubble-spots-some-granddaddy-galaxies/