Into The Universe Stephen Hawking Analysis

In “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking,” Hawking discusses his vision of the universe and it’s ability to exist. In the episode, Hawking shares his knowledge on how the universe came into existence and how it managed to become what it is today. Hawking also shares the evidence that scientists, such as himself, have collected through the years. First of all, the video discuss that “the universe is constantly expanding… like balloon.” Hawking explains this by a simple demonstration of the Doppler Affect. He explains that on a straight road, when a car approaches you at a high rate of speed, it appears to be slightly blue. When it moves farther away, it appears to be slightly red. Similarly, when scientists looked through high-powered telescopes,
they noticed that the distant galaxies appeared to be slightly red in color. This suggests that the universe is constantly expanding. If were to rewind 14 billion years, we would see the point when the universe burst into life. The point which is commonly referred to as The Big Bang. The explosion happened in total darkness because any kind of light did not exist. The explosion came from a ball less than the size of an atom. It expanded to the size of an orange in less than a trillionth of a second. Within 100 seconds, it was the size of our solar system. It realized massive amounts of radiation. The pure energy of the cosmos, which was released in the The Big Bang, began to cool and create matter. Subatomic particles began to appear. At the same time, anti-matter was also created. When anti-matter and matter collide, they are both destroyed. At the end, there was more matter than anti-matter. The remaining matter is what created the universe we know today. After cooling for about 330,000 years, the universe was finally visible.
It was simply a cloud a gas. Hawking discusses how he is astonished at the fact everything, such as galaxies and other cosmic matter, came from this cloud of gas. And it all had to be built atom-by-atom. The amount of atoms involved in this process is unthinkable. Hawking believes that the all this happened because of gravity. After the Big Bang, the gas was spread throughout the universe. Gravity began to pull these gases together over the course of the next 200 million years. In the early universe, the gas was not evenly spread out, therefore causing areas of high density. The gas simply clumped together. These high density areas is where the first galaxies were
born. In these gases, there was one of the most simple gases to exist, Hydrogen.
If you heat hydrogen to 10 million degrees, it creates energy that stars use to shine. When hydrogen is heated to 10 million degrees, a process called nuclear fusion takes place. It creates a new, heavier element called helium. Some of the matter in this reaction is covered to pure energy which bursts out in all direction. In this process, a new star is created. The first star was a 1000 times bigger than our own sun and it gave off deep blue color. The first elements were created in these stars. If we were to cut open a star, we would see that helium sinks to the center and hydrogen stays near the surface of the star. As Helium reacts with one another, it creates a new, even heavier element called Carbon. The process is very repetitive, causing the star to be layered like an onion. Now, even more elements were created, such as Neon, Oxygen, and Iron. The iron sinks to the center of the star. Iron cannot create another element, therefore the fusion stops. Eventually, the star stops producing the energy and collapses. As the core is compressed, the temperature of the star rises. It eventually explodes and creates what is called a Supernova. The shockwave that comes from the supernova is so powerful, that is forces the iron to form even heavier elements such as gold, platinum, and lead. This eventually leads to more and more elements being formed. It creates everything we see around us. Stars created
the galaxies we know today. The Milky-way happens to be one of the oldest in our universe. It eventually led to the creation of solar systems and planets. All of this is the product of the imperfection in the gas and gravity.