In the beginning

Living things breathe, feed, grow and

leave offspring. They range from the
simplest single-celled bacteria to plants,
birds, animals and humans. Earth is the
only world we know that supports life. No
one knows how life began. It seems to
involve the coming together of certain
chemicals. But what changes these
chemicals into life-forms is a mystery.

Studies of ancient rocks have shown that

How does life begin? How does it evolve? life began on Earth about 3 800 million
years ago. At that time, the Earth was a
Extreme life very unfriendly place. The air was dense
and poisonous. Comets and meteorites
Today, scientists are not so sure that life
were raining down on the planet.
began on or near the Earth's surface.
The young Earth was a water world with
Everywhere we look, there seems to be life
small areas of dry land. Many scientists
– even several kilometres underground. It
think that life began in the lakes and
may be that life began at the bottom of the
oceans. Many of the ingredients from
oceans, where hot springs provided
which life started may have been brought
energy instead of sunlight.
by comets and meteorites.
Another idea is that life – or at least the
chemical building blocks – came from
space. Many comets were crashing into
Earth early in its history. Comets are rich
in carbon-based chemicals from which life
could have started.
It is also possible that life could transfer
from one planet to another. It seems that Did life begin in the oceans?
life is tough enough to survive a long
journey through space. A large comet or
Did life begin in the oceans?
meteorite crashing into the Earth could
throw large numbers of rocks into space.
Lightning and ultraviolet light from the
Any bacteria that are riding as passengers
Sun may have split the hydrogen-rich
on these rocks could eventually land on
gases in the atmosphere. Energy may also
another planet.
have come from hot springs on the sea
In the same way, a meteorite from Mars
bed, known as ‘black smokers’. Over time,
could carry Martian life (if it existed) to
the simple chemicals joined to become
Earth. In 1996, scientists told the world
larger, more complex chemicals.
that they had found just such a Martian
rock in Antarctica. However, other Once these chemicals collected in the
scientists question their research. oceans or lakes, they formed an 'organic
soup'. One day, an accident occurred. A
molecule began to make copies of itself.
Earth had sprung to life.

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The Big Bang
Most astronomers believe the Universe
began in a Big Bang about 14 billion years
ago. At that time, the entire Universe was
inside a bubble that was thousands of
times smaller than a pinhead. It was
hotter and denser than anything we can
imagine.
Then it suddenly exploded. The Universe
that we know was born. Time, space and
matter all began with the Big Bang. In a
fraction of a second, the Universe grew
from smaller than a single atom to bigger
than a galaxy. And it kept on growing at a
fantastic rate. It is still expanding today.
As the Universe expanded and cooled,
energy changed into particles of matter
and antimatter. These two opposite types
of particles largely destroyed each other.
But some matter survived. More stable
particles called protons and neutrons
started to form when the Universe was one
second old.
Over the next three minutes, the
temperature dropped below 1 billion
degrees Celsius. It was now cool enough
for the protons and neutrons to come
together, forming hydrogen and helium
nuclei.
After 300 000 years, the Universe had
cooled to about 3000 degrees. Atomic
nuclei could finally capture electrons to
form atoms. The Universe filled with
clouds of hydrogen and helium gas.
The birth of galaxies
We cannot see anything that happened
during the first 300 000 years of the
Universe. Scientists try to work it out from
their knowledge of atomic particles and
from computer models.
The only direct evidence of the Big Bang
itself is a faint glow in space. Spacecraft
and telescopes on balloons see this as a
patchy pattern of slightly warmer and
cooler gas all around us. These ripples also
show where the hydrogen clouds were
slightly denser.
As millions of years passed, the dense
areas pulled in material because they had
more gravity. Finally, about 100 million
years after the Big Bang, the gas became
hot and dense enough for the first stars to
form.
New stars were being born at a rate 10
times higher than in the present-day
Universe. Large clusters of stars soon
became the first galaxies.
Hubble's newest camera eyes hotbed of
star formation
The Hubble Space Telescope and powerful
ground-based telescopes are now
beginning to find galaxies that were
created about one billion years after the
Big Bang. These small galaxies were much
closer together than galaxies are today.
Collisions were common. Like two flames
moving towards each other, they merged
into bigger galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy
came together in this way.
What is space?
In space, no one can hear you scream.
This is because there is no air in space – it
is a vacuum. Sound waves cannot travel
through a vacuum.
'Outer space' begins about 100 km above
the Earth, where the shell of air around our
planet disappears. With no air to scatter
sunlight and produce a blue sky, space
appears as a black blanket dotted with
stars.
Space is usually regarded as being
completely empty. But this is not true. The
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vast gaps between the stars and planets
are filled with huge amounts of thinly
spread gas and dust. Even the emptiest
parts of space contain at least a few
hundred atoms or molecules per cubic
metre.
Space is also filled with many forms of
radiation that are dangerous to
astronauts. Much of this infrared and
ultraviolet radiation comes from the Sun.
High energy X-rays, gamma rays and
cosmic rays – particles travelling close to
the speed of light – arrive from distant star
systems.
The Universe
The Universe is everything we can touch,
feel, sense, measure or detect. It includes
living things, planets, stars, galaxies, dust
clouds, light, and even time. Before the birth
of the Universe, time, space and matter did
not exist.
The Universe contains billions of galaxies,
each containing millions or billions of stars.
The space between the stars and galaxies is
largely empty. However, even places far
from stars and planets contain scattered
particles of dust or a few hydrogen atoms
per cubic centimeter. Space is also filled with
radiation (e.g. light and heat), magnetic
fields and high energy particles (e.g. cosmic
rays).
The Universe is incredibly huge. It would
take a modern jet fighter more than a million
years to reach the nearest star to the Sun.
Travelling at the speed of light (300,000 km
per second), it would take 100,000 years to
cross our Milky Way galaxy alone.
No one knows the exact size of the Universe,
because we cannot see the edge – if there is
one. All we do know is that the visible
Universe is at least 93 billion light years
across. (A light year is the distance light
travels in one year – about 9 trillion km.)
The Universe has not always been the same
size. Scientists believe it began in a Big
Bang, which took place nearly 14 billion
years ago. Since then, the Universe has
been expanding outward at very high speed.
So the area of space we now see is billions
of times bigger than it was when the
Universe was very young. The galaxies are
also moving further apart as the space
between them expands.
Black Holes
Black holes are the strangest objects in the
Universe. A black hole does not have a
surface, like a planet or star. Instead, it is a
region of space where matter has collapsed
in on itself. This catastrophic collapse results
in a huge amount of mass being
concentrated in an incredibly small area. The
gravitational pull of this region is so great
that nothing can escape – not even light.
Although black holes cannot be seen, we
know they exist from the way they affect
nearby dust, stars and galaxies. Many of
them are surrounded by discs of material. As
the discs swirl around them like a whirlpool,
they become extremely hot and give off X-
rays.
Black holes come in many different sizes.
Many of them are only a few times more
massive than the Sun. These 'stellar-mass'
black holes form when a heavyweight star,
about 10 times heavier than the Sun, ends
its life in a supernova explosion. What is left
of the star – still several solar masses -
collapses into an area only a few kilometres
across.
Most galaxies, including the Milky Way, have
supermassive black holes at their centres.
These may be millions or billions of times
heavier than our Sun. Supermassive black
holes also power active galaxies and ancient
galaxies known as quasars. Quasars may be
hundreds of times brighter than even the
largest ordinary galaxies.
Objects that fall into black holes are literally
stretched to breaking point. An astronaut
who ventured too close and was sucked into
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a black hole would be pulled apart by the
overpowering gravity.
The mystery of the dark
Universe
Ordinary matter makes up everything we
can see, smell or touch. This matter – which
is made from atoms – also makes up planets
and stars.
All objects made of atoms pull on each other
according to how much matter they contain.
This is the effect of gravity and is why a
small, low mass object such as an apple falls
towards a much more massive object - the
Earth.
Astronomers believe that there must also be
another kind of invisible "dark matter" which
is spread throughout the Universe. By
studying the Milky Way and many distant
galaxies, they have found that visible matter
alone cannot account for how fast stars
rotate in them. On its own, normal matter
would not be able to create enough gravity
to hold these galaxies together.
Scientists can also tell that there is some
unknown material in the space between the
stars, because its gravitational pull
influences the path of starlight travelling
towards Earth. Matter – both ordinary and
dark - can act like a magnifying glass,
bending and distorting light from galaxies
and clusters behind it. Astronomers can use
this effect, called gravitational lensing, to
map the distribution of dark matter.
Only about 15% of the matter in the
Universe is made of atoms. The remainder is
dark matter. However, no one knows what
dark matter is made of. We do know that it
does not absorb, emit or reflect light,
because none of our scientific instruments
can directly detect it.
Many scientists believe that most dark
matter is some unknown subatomic (smaller
than an atom) particle that interacts only
very weakly with normal matter. If this is
true, billions of these particles will have
passed through your body by the time you
finish reading this article. Experiments
buried deep underground may one day
measure the presence of one such particle
passing through, finally solving the mystery
of what dark matter really is.
Cosmic distances
Space is huge. It is so immense that is very
difficult to imagine the distances involved,
even between the objects in our local
neighbourhood, the Solar System. If
astronomers used kilometres to describe
these distances they would have to use very
big numbers. Therefore, to simplify things,
and to make the numbers smaller and easier
to handle, different measurements are used.
The astronomical unit
The distance between the Earth and the Sun
is about one hundred and fifty million
kilometres. This is a big number, and so
astronomers use the astronomical unit to
describe this distance. One astronomical
unit, or ‘au’, is the distance between the
Earth and the Sun. It is used to compare the
distances of other bodies in the Solar
System, such as the Sun, the planets,
comets, and asteroids.
Light year
What about beyond our Solar System? How
far is it to the next nearest star, Proxima
Centauri? Proxima Centauri is about 38 000
000 000 000 km (thirty eight million million
kilometres) away. It is such a long way
away, that if a spacecraft travelled to this
star it could take around 75 000 years to get
there.
Using the astronomical unit to describe the
distances of stars (and objects outside our
Solar System), doesn’t really help to give
small numbers for astronomers to work with.
Promixa Centauri is a distance of roughly
265 000 au. Another unit is needed! So to
measure the distance (to at least the nearest
stars to us), light years can be used.
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Light is the fastest thing we know. Through
space, light can travel at a speed of nearly
300 000 km/s. A light year is the distance
that light can travel in one year, which is 9
461 000 000 000 kilometres! To travel this
distance to the next closest star to the Solar
System, light takes around 4.2 years,
therefore astronomers say that Proxima
Centauri is 4.2 light years away.

That is just the nearest star. The night sky is

filled with stars in our Galaxy, the Milky Way.
The nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way is
an enormous two and a half million light
years away. That’s just the nearest! Many
galaxies, also packed with stars, are
thousands of times further away. Space is
huge!

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