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   myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Saturday, 21-Sep-2024 03:57:48 JST myrmepropagandist

   I’m making a 13.7 billion year long timeline with 5th graders mostly to teach them the difference in scale between billions and millions— but also to get them curious (I hope) about the way things bunch up and cluster together. I need more ideas for “significant events in the history of the universe/earth”

   Nothing too technical.

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     powersoffour (powersoffour@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Sep-2024 03:57:47 JST powersoffour

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     @futurebird I don't think this is necessarily too technical, but it might be. The era of reionization, when the universe became transparent ("optically thin") in visible light and once again visible to a human observer, is a really cool concept. It lends itself really well to demonstrations of the way stars and galaxies formed.

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kifF3RYcfn0

     This is a viz of a simulation of reionization and it's really evocative. (We simulate universes as periodic cubes, thus the boxiness.)

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     powersoffour (powersoffour@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Sep-2024 04:37:41 JST powersoffour

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     • mcc

     @mcc @futurebird I work on the first stars and that is all pretty much my understanding, modulo some recent oddness in JWST.

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     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Sep-2024 04:37:42 JST mcc

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     @futurebird Formation of moon, 4.5 billion years ago.

     One of the things that's most interesting to me about the "galactic" timeline is (another person's chart points this out too…) how many interesting things happen within like, twenty minutes of the big bang. I think most of these details are too technical or if described plainly might mislead a grade school student ("matter/antimatter war completes, matter wins") but there are two things I think are of note:

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     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Sep-2024 04:37:42 JST mcc

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     @futurebird

     1. First stars, 100 million years after the big bang

     2. If a grade school student is ready for this idea, it's very interesting to me that because of the speed of light, the further away we look in distance the further back we look in time. And if you get too far back, you can't see anything, because the pre-star-formation, neutral-hydrogen era is just opaque! I think it's interesting if you look too far back in time there's a literal cloud you can't see through.

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     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Sep-2024 04:37:42 JST mcc

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     @futurebird …I think I described that iffily. This is the book I'm summarizing (it's good, but it's from 2009 so it seems possible it's at least a little outdated by now)