TST Big Bang Timeline

The singularity 13.8 billion years ago is speculative. We don’t know what came “before”—or if “before” even makes sense.

Electrostatic plasma sphere in the dark. Tesla coil - physics experiment

Person shining a light at the sky and making the stars rapidly move in circles - fantasy concept

Closeup shot of a colorful plasma ball on a black background

NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/Spaceengine, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

M31 Andromeda Galaxy

Stars in observatory

Epic sun surface flare prominence solar system

Imagined image depicting the formation of the Moon with Theia having a rocky and molten surface, reflecting its primordial state. This should now accurately illustrate the collision between Theia and the early Earth.

sunset north sea sea 2191645

Geyser in Yellowstone National Park

micro organisms cells background

For tens of millions of years, Earth plunged into its deepest known freeze. Ice sheets reached sea level at low latitudes, perhaps even the equator, turning the planet into a near-global ice world and reshaping the path toward complex life.

When Pangaea began to split around 190 million years ago, the world’s connected landmasses slowly turned into separate evolutionary arenas: vicariance. What had once been one giant stage for life became a set of growing barriers, helping drive the rise of distinct northern and southern lineages.

Top view of astrologer hands

"<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/37413900@N04/13297090724" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Red Giant Star</a>" by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/37413900@N04" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Maxwell Hamilton</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY 2.0</a>

Brown dwarfs (also called failed stars) are substellar objects that are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen into helium in their cores, unlike a main-sequence star. Instead, they have a mass between the most massive gas giant planets and the least massive stars, approximately 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter. However, they can fuse deuterium and the most massive ones (> 65 MJ) can fuse lithium. Astronomers classify self-luminous objects by spectral class, a distinction intimately tied to the surface temperature, and brown dwarfs occupy types M, L, T, and Y. As brown dwarfs do not undergo stable hydrogen fusion, they cool down over time, progressively passing through later spectral types as they age. Despite their name, to the naked eye, brown dwarfs would appear in different colors depending on their temperature. The warmest ones are possibly orange or red, while cooler brown dwarfs would likely appear magenta or black to the human eye. Brown dwarfs may be fully convective, with no layers or chemical differentiation by depth. As brown dwarfs have relatively low surface temperatures, they are not very bright at visible wavelengths, emitting most of their light in the infrared. However, with the advent of more capable infrared detecting devices, thousands of brown dwarfs have been identified. The nearest known brown dwarfs are located in the Luhman 16 system, a binary of L- and T-type brown dwarfs about 6.5 light-years from the Sun. Luhman 16 is the third closest system to the Sun after Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star. Image created by Pablo Carlos Budassi in 2023 (pablocarlosbudassi.com)