Modern Cosmology - What We Know

August 4  2015 ” Modern Cosmology: What we now know!”, Presented by Mike Adler, Geologists of Jackson Hole member

Do you want to know how the universe was created, what the size of the universe is, whether the universe had a beginning, how the universe has evolved, whether the universe will last forever, and whether the universe is unique or whether there are other universes? These are the questions that astronomers are grappling with and because of very recent data from the European Science Agency’s Planck satellite and previous information from the USA WMAP satellite and the discovery of the Higgs boson there are answers to some of these questions. These questions have been pondered for millenia and we live in a unique time where in the last ten years we now know that the universe began 13.8 billion years ago, and that 95 percent of the universe is made up of dark energy and dark matter which we do not understand but know they exist. In this talk we will show where the Bang in the Big Bang came from and review the new data that allow us to pin down the constituents of the universe to within 2 percent accuracy. We also know in detail how the universe evolved over its 13.8 billion years, when the first stars were born, and how it will evolve in the future. We will discuss how the Higgs boson and field could explain the period of Inflation where the universe expanded up to 50 orders of magnitude in 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0001 seconds and the current strange anti gravity(called Dark Energy) that is causing the universe to accelerate its expansion. Other topics include a possible instability in the universe, how the universe could have “Begun from Nothing”, and why it is likely that there are many other universes.