Do The Stars Fall? From the Big Bang to Asteroids and Meteorites, there's a lot to learn about the Universe.
The observer of the night sky sees beautiful light shining in all directions as if the stars were set as decorations for the sky, and this view is much more beautiful if the sky is viewed from a spot where the lights are not contaminated, but sometimes you see a light falling or moving very fast as if it were a falling star.
Is that true? Can the stars fall away and travel through space?
To explain the source of this light, we must mention many other phenomena and concepts of considerable importance for our universe's proper understanding. In the first place, there are what are known as comets, asteroids, and meteorites, and they differ in components and sizes and also differ in places in the Solar group, which are the main source of that moving light in the sky.
After addressing the origin of matter and the solar system, which is the major source of this phenomenon, we will detail all this.
The origin of the matter
Following the relationship of equivalence between mass and energy that Einstein introduced into relativity theory E=mc2, it turns out that energy and mass are two faces to the same coin, but the mass is just a property of matter properties; it like the electric charge, mass we know its origin and source after we observed The Higgs boson, which makes the particles interact with the Higgs field, and this is what gives the physical particles the property of mass, but regarding the electric charge property, it is still a mystery to physicists until this moment.
 |
| accelerated expansion of the universe. source: Wikipedia |
The current universe, which is approximately 13.8 billion years old, originated from a very small point of infinite density and very high temperature, implying that the whole universe as we know it today emerged from that point, which contained the energy of the entire universe while matter did not exist at the time. The universe began to expand very rapidly and in an accelerated manner after this tiny cosmic point was subjected to very high inflation in a very short period measured at 10³²⁻ seconds, and it continues to expand until the moment.
The first atoms to form were simple atoms like hydrogen and helium after about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, but the hydrogen nuclei, or protons, emerged after about 0.000001 seconds after the Big Bang, indicating that the first particles formed after that time period. Protons, which are not elementary particles but are made from the upper and lower quarks, which are considered the elementary particles that comprise the substance along with the electrons, and the source of both of them naturally is the energy that was the starting point at the moment of the Big Bang, appeared before this time.
Nebula
 |
| Nebula. source: Wikipedia |
The interstellar temperature is ideal for the creation of atoms 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Later, in cosmic space, the raw materials for the formation of stars and planets are created. As the universe expands, more atoms are created, including hydrogen, helium, and cosmic dust, which then formed masses and matter clusters in space in the form of a great cloud, which is now known as a nebula because it contains cosmic dust and ionized gases in addition to hydrogen and helium.
Furthermore, remnants of some massive stars may have played a role in the formation of some nebulae during a massive occurrence known as a Supernova.
Most nebulae are found in very huge and large sizes, and one of them may reach hundreds of light-years, but the density of this material that forms nebulae is very weak as it is less than the vacuum that we can produce on Earth, and this gives us an idea of how the atoms and cosmic dust particles are located. Some of it is above each other in cosmic space, so that a nebula the size of a globe only has a mass equivalent to a few kilograms.
Because of the electromagnetic waves produced by the stars, the gas-forming nebula is excited and emits colored lights. Depending on what it consists of in terms of dust and gases, the nebula is a fertile place for the formation of stars, as is the case with the birth Our solar system, formed by cosmic dust and gases 4,568 billion years ago, formed a nebula in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Galaxy
The cosmos is a gigantic and very large gathering of billions of stars and suns of different sizes, gases, and cosmic dust, and scientists believe it contains dark matter, as well as a black hole with a huge mass at its core. The length of a single galaxy can exceed 80,000 light-years, in other words, you can find in the galaxy at the same time the birth and death of stars, as well as nebulae and the existence of planets, are considered a hotbed of almost all astronomical phenomena observed in space, and scientists estimate that our universe, whose true size we don't know, may contain up to 2000 billion galaxies.
The Solar System
Our solar system began to form about 4.6 billion years ago, when a nebula in the form of a very large cloud of gases and cosmic dust formed within the Milky Way galaxy, and due to gravity, the matter in this nebula began to accumulate in the form of small scattered clusters, and when the size of these masses increases, the gravity increases more, making the matter more withdrawn. As the substance continued to accumulate and the nebula collapsed, the cloud of matter began to collapse in on itself, causing the pressure and temperature to gradually rise. As the substance continued to accumulate and the nebula collapsed, the heart of the cloud began to rotate around itself at a faster and faster rate, causing the pressure and temperature to gradually rise. The material in the center started to take on the characteristics of a star over time, indicating the birth of the first star within the cloud, which would illuminate the nebula's remains with nuclear fusion energy released by the star's core. The pressure and temperature within the star's center continued to increase, but the collapse will not last indefinitely because the gravitational forces will soon even out. What is within the star's core during its formation is just the fourth state plasma of matter where electrons detach from their nuclei and the atoms collapse and we only have a mixture of nuclei, so the pressure forces arising from nuclear fusion inside the star's center, which would cause the star to settle to a certain size, and hence the collapse of the star on itself, ends. This process of separating atoms and electrons from them does not happen immediately, but rather takes billions of years.
 |
| The Solar System. source: Wikipedia |
The remaining gases and cosmic dust continue to swim and rotate around the newborn star due to gravity and the law of inertia, resulting in a concentration of matter in the same area around the star, and due to collisions that occur between cosmic dust and gases during a very fast rotation around the star, and the size of these rocks gradually increases, because of the difference in distance between these physical groupings away from the sun, the components of these groups vary from one another, so the groupings closest to the sun are mainly fossilized rock.
The physical aggregations that consist of ice evaporate due to the high temperature, while the distant physical gatherings from the sun contain in addition to the rocky fossils on the ice because it is a very cold area due to the low temperature. As a result of the solar winds, the gases of hydrogen and helium moved away towards the distant planets that were formed from ice, and by the gravitational pull of these large planets, these gases were attracted towards them, and after billions of years there were only four great balls of matter surrounded by gases and they are now called the gaseous planets, which are four Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
On the other side near the Sun, because the planets consist mainly of rock, ice can't be formed due to high temperatures. After millions of years, collisions continued to form four rocky planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, between the rocky clusters.
However, not all the material in the nebula or material cloud was created as a star which is our sun, and eight known planets, but in the space of the solar system there was still much cosmic matter and pollution, and thousands of fossilized rocks and ice blocks of different shapes can reach Each of them may occasionally reach several hundred kilometers orbiting the solar path, and it is comets and asteroids that still have gravity and inertia, rotating around the sun.
Star
 |
| Stars. source: Wikipedia |
As mentioned above, a star is formed in various stages in the formation of the solar system, but after millions of years of formation, it eventually becomes a material body where hydrogen and helium atoms form its raw material at the beginning of the formation and eventually becomes its main fuel when the atoms collapse. The fourth physical state of matter is the core of the star which forms plasma, the mixture of protons, neutrons, and electrons, atomic nuclei nuclear fusion starts at the heart of a star due to enormous increases in temperature and pressure, and nuclear fusion leads, after consuming a large proportion of hydrogen, to lighter nuclei formation in order to form heavier nuclei, including carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. And very huge electromagnetic energy is released after this merging process, most of which is visible in the spectrum but also in the rest of the invisible frequencies, in a lesser proportion.
Remnants of Nebula
 | |
Remnants of Nebula
|
We mean remnants of the nebula, all of the other bodies, not forming planets or moons, i.e. those comets or asteroids which, as with the planets of our solar system, were not destined to be formed by giant planets.
Asteroids
They exist between Jupiter and Mars in form of a huge belt containing millions of different size asteroids, the sizes of which vary from several meters to a couple of kilometers, and they are called small meteorites that are rotated around the sun and around the rest of the planets. A meteorite, made up mainly of minerals and rocks, is solid and fossilized, like the rock from which our planet is formed.
 | |
|
Sometimes, because of the great gravity of Jupiter, asteroids and meteorites collide, Jupiter affects one of the asteroids from time to time and its paths change, causing some to collide with one another and leading to divides and disintegration after heavy collisions; Because of such collisions, the remnants of the crash follow other random paths, and some of these meteorites go near to Earth, leading to contact with the Earth's atmosphere sometimes, and passing through it sometimes without sinking to the ground and continuing their path in space. but they lose some of their energy because the friction with the earth's atmosphere causes these meteorites to change their path, and in other times these meteoric stones drop on the ground and are called meteorites, as a reason of increasing temperature as a result of gas compression during the meteorite's passage through the earth's atmosphere. And, due to the ionization and excitement of the atmospheric gas, the gases start emitting the light that we see as meteors, so the light we see in the fall of the meteorite is not a property that it owns but only the arousal of the components of the atmosphere.
 |
| Meteorite. source: Wikipedia |
Comets
As it happens with asteroids, it may also happen with comets, which are blocks of ice for a mixture of frozen materials, including water, methane, ammonia, and other materials. These comets are located in two different places. The first is called a "Kuiper belt", which is located at the end of the solar system and encircles it in the form of a belt. The second place is called the “Oort Cloud”, which is in the form of a cloud surrounding the solar system as a whole in the form of a sphere in which the solar system is located. All these comets revolve around the sun in very large elliptical orbits, and the one cycle of the comet in its path may reach more than 200 years approximately, In fact, these glaciers are not called comets except when they have a tail that drags them with them when they approach the sun, but when they are far from the sun, they cannot be seen and they do not have any tail shining with them and they are called only a mass of physical ice.
 |
| Kuiper Belt and The Oort cloud. source: Wikipedia |
This tail which follows the comet appears due to the evaporation, by the high temperature, of the gaseous from the ice mass of a comet as it approaches the sun, and this tail is always in the opposite direction to the sun due to the solar wind which causes the evaporated gasses to move in a direction to the solar wind. The small, very fast ones coming out and moving away from the sun consist mostly of charged particles such as electrons, neutrons, protons, and even neutrinos.
Sometimes this comet passes close to the Earth’s path, leaving behind a shower of dust, solid fragments, and ice, and as soon as the earth reaches that region during its rotation around the sun, the Earth’s sky begins to be full of meteor showers and this is due to the friction and compression of the comet’s remnants with the Earth’s atmosphere during its fall.
We call a meteor that light that accompanies the phenomenon of meteorite fall, that is, the flash that is followed by the Earth's atmosphere as a result of excitation and ionization of its physical components due to friction and compression when one of the asteroids or comet remnants of dust and ice enter it, and this is what we see in the sky at night, as it seems to us as if one of the stars falls rapidly in space or falls on the earth, but this is a misconception because it has nothing to do with the falling stars or moving them in space quickly, rather it is only related to the remnants of comets, asteroids or meteorites that enter the Earth's atmosphere.
The solar system and earth age
How did science predict the solar system age and the world age?
Much of the planets' surfaces have evolved irreversibly for the next billions of years, and that's why there are no ancient planetary materials that will enable us to revert back into time to the first moments of the solar system's creation to measure the above.
This is why meteorites originating from outside the earth make up ancient rocks, in particular, a certain kind of stone, called "chondrites" that are the earliest bodies in the solar system, and it is assumed that, after the first moments of the development of the solar system, the core of these objects has changed little, calculating their decomposition age. We can very precisely predict the solar system's age since the solar system is about 4,568 billion years old!
 | |
|
The oldest rocks on Earth, which are tiny crystalline inclusions of zircon, are estimated to be 4,404 billion years old! This leaves roughly 150 million years at most to form the planet Earth.
The image belongs to the "Allende" meteorite, which is considered the most famous "carbon chondrite" meteor through which the age of the solar system was estimated.
 | |
'Allende' meteorite
|
Conclusion
Not all the meteors that we see in the Earth's sky are caused by meteorites falling on the Earth, but rather may only result from the passage of these meteorites through the Earth's atmosphere, moving in space without falling to the ground.
The meteorites appearing in the sky as if they are a falling star, are not really the case and have nothing to do with the stars. They are just ionization and excitation in the earth's atmosphere due to the entrance into the atmosphere of some stones of meteorites caused by an asteroid collision or the rests of some comets. The temperature, which makes it start to shine, as for the stars, is millions of light-years from us and is very big, some of them bigger than our sun.
NOTE!
It should be noted here that the word "ice" used in the article does not refer only to water, but also to other substances that exist in the form of ice, such as methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ammonia in addition to water, and this ice is the one that consists of most of the comets that we talked about. In the article.
I based the content of this article on the experience I gained during my undergraduate studies. I've always been inspired by astronomy and cosmic phenomena, as well as scientific theory and physical law. I've spent a lot of time focusing on blogs and scientific sources, such as Wikipedia, because it has a lot of reliable sources, to write the article in the best way.
Was this article helpful? Give it a share!
No comments: