yorkiefan_ | 03-09-2014 04:35 PM | T-Minus 25 minutes until Cosmos This is the first thing on TV I have been all that interested in since the Breaking Bad finale! I can't wait to see this tonight, as I love Neils deGrasse Tyson. Our picture of the universe has changed so much since Sagan's original series, and thus it really needs a reboot. Back at the time of the original Cosmos we had just found the cosmic microwave background (airtight evidence for the Big Bang). The discovery of dark matter was about 10 years old. What we now call dark energy was then just thought to be an error in Einstein's field equations, but now we know it has to be 70% of the universe to account for its incredible expansion. Back then we had never observed a black hole. I don't think quasars were at the time known to be supermassive black holes of the type at the center of most galaxies. Exoplanets were science fiction. We didn't know the Kuiper Belt well (which is why Pluto was once considered a planet) nor did we know much about the Oort Cloud (where Comet ISON came from last Thanksgiving). We didn't know about the sulfates indicative of water once being on Mars. We had never witnessed a devastating comet strike like when Shoemaker-Levy plowed into Jupiter. We didn't have space telescopes like Chandra and Hubble expanding our horizons. We didn't know if you turned a telescope to look at the emptiest patch of 1/32 millionth of the night sky that you could find 5000+ galaxies, each containing a hundred billion stars (the Hubble Deep Field). What a mindblowing 34 years it has been in astrophysics since. Easily the 34 most productive years in the history of the science. |