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In this video, NASA's James Bond shows how the Universe

July 20, 2017 by Devin Jones

In this video, NASA's James Bond shows how the Universe has changed as it expands. Credit: John C. Schmitt/U.S. Geological Survey

In a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Bond and a team of astronomers describe the evolution of the Universe from a single cosmic epoch to a chaotic one. The new model, they call it the Cosmic Reconstruction Project of Earth. It involves using new simulations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to show how the Universe changed over a million years and beyond. The process was the result of millions of years of observation of massive cosmic events, including the Big Bang.

"If we did this before in the Big Bang, we'd have seen two galaxies, one black and one white," said Bond, who heads the Sloan team. "Now we see the first two galaxies, and we see the first two galaxies in a state of motion that we've never seen before."

The new model allows a detailed understanding of how the Universe changed from a single cosmic epoch to a chaotic one, and to how the events that occurred during that time led to the emergence of the first galaxies.

"I think it's important to start with the first two galaxies, because in those years, they would have made up a very large number of galaxies and then they would have formed a new galaxy," said Bond. That new galaxy would have been the Milky Way.

"That's one of the things that we've learned over the years, that supernova explosions can be a really big deal in the Universe, and we can learn some of our lessons in the next few years in the field and in the future," said Schmitt, a research associate at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

"It's really important to start with the first two galaxies, because in those years, they would have made up a very large number of galaxies and then they would have formed a new galaxy," said Schmitt, and that is why the Milky Way became the first galaxy to arise from the Big Bang.

The new model is the first to have been used in a large-scale cosmic reconstruction work. This new model shows how the Universe changed over a million years and beyond, and how the same process will affect the future of the Universe. They show that the Universe changed so dramatically over the past two million years that when some of the galaxies in the new model came into being, all of them would have experienced a single event that changed their history — or, more accurately, how