This timeline shows the whole past and future of the universe
If you’re the kind of person who sometimes wakes up at 3 a.m. and tries to figure out where the Universe and everything in it is going while lying in bed, we have something for you (also, same).
This amazing (and very long) infographic from 2015 just keeps going and going and going. Which makes sense, since we’re talking about the whole life of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the “heat death” of everything we know and love.
The Timeline of the Universe was made by the Slovak graphic designer Martin Vargic. It shows what has happened in space over the past 13.8 billion years and what is likely to happen over the next 10 billion or so.
He’s even broken everything down into things that affect space, Earth, life, and people, so you can easily see what will hurt us the most in the end.
We start with the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago and was the start of everything.
Methuselah, which is about 190,1 light-years from Earth and is the oldest star we know of, was born during this event.
Astronomers have had a lot of trouble with this strange star in the past. At one point, they thought it was about 16 billion years old, which is way before the Universe was born and doesn’t make any sense.
Scientists didn’t figure out how old Methuselah was until 2013. They used a new way to combine information about its distance, brightness, composition, and structure to come up with a much younger age for the oldest known star.
“When you add up all of these factors, you get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a small amount of uncertainty that makes the star’s age fit with the age of the Universe,” lead researcher Howard Bond from Pennsylvania State University said at the time.
Mike Wall from Space.com says that 14.5 billion is still younger than the estimated age of the Universe. However, the uncertainty Bond is talking about allows for a range of plus or minus 800 million years. This means that their calculations could put the formation of Methuselah at 13.7 billion years old, just after the Big Bang, but only just.
Fast forward 10.4 billion years, and the Universe becomes habitable for the first time, giving life its first chance.
Still, we won’t see any life on Earth until 4.2 billion years ago. After that, though, things move along very quickly. (The timeline also shows the more conservative estimate that life first appeared on Earth 3.9 billion years ago.)
Want to know when the first natural nuclear reactor formed on Earth or how long ago the brightest star in the night sky was born? Well, I hope you like to scroll, because you’re going to have to do a lot of it to find out.
When you get to the bottom of the timeline, you can have fun because you’ll know all the horrible details of how the Universe is supposed to end, such as when Saturn’s rings will turn into dust, Earth’s orbit will be thrown completely off, and the Sun will run out of hydrogen. Have fun.
