The Universe in Under 6 Minutes
In the time before history, in the time before there were Jews, humans could count only a few thousand stars in the night. Our ancestors believed that the whole of creation consisted of these few thousand twinkling travelers in the sky, eternal and immutable.
By the time of the Babylonians and Egyptians it was well established that the Gods who created the Universe lived in the very heavens circling our lonely planet.
With the invention of the telescope the Universe expanded and the heavens no longer circled the Earth. The Milky Way was the entire Universe.
Einstein came along and the Universe consisted not only of space but of time.
In 1922, Edwin Hubble discovered other galaxies and the Universe not only expanded further but was found to be expanding forever.
I was only 4 years old when Fred Hoyle mockingly coined the term Big Bang during a 1949 radio broadcast. Since then, it has become the prevailing scientific model of the Universe. This theory holds that the universe expanded from an extremely hot, dense phase called the Planck epoch, in which all matter and energy was concentrated.
Now we come to the present day. Our universe is 13.73 billion years old (give or take 100 million years), and our night sky is filled with black holes, pulsars, quasars, neutron stars, white dwarfs, magnetars, nebulae, and hundreds of billions of galaxies with each galaxy hosting up to a trillion stars.
The American Museum of Natural History presents the video called The Known Universe, a beautiful journey of less than 6 minutes:
Here's the text from Youtube:
The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.
A tip of the turban 
to blogger The Right Nation.
