nature.net: The Universe

Natural History, Feb, 1999 by Robert (American businessman and engineer) Anderson

nature.net Interested in the big picture? The home page of NASA'S Internet site, Structure and Evolution of the Universe (universe.gsfc.nasa.gov), is a fun place to start. On the introductory page, try clicking on one of the images of the universe, such as the Milky Way's gamma ray halo and the red-enhanced cloud of hot, glowing, intergalactic gas. The site also has links to NASA's cosmology-related educational resources, including one for young people called StarChild. Cosmos in a Computer (www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ Cyberia/Cosmos/CosmosCompHome. html), at the University of Illinois, has sophisticated images and simulations that allow you to "witness the birth of the cosmos, watch the universe unfold, all from your desktop."

The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles has an excellent list of more than one hundred astronomy links (www. GriffithObs.org/StarAward.html). One I tried was PBS's Mysteries of Deep Space (pbs.org/deepspace/index.html). At this site, you can call up transcripts of the three shows in the PBS series, but also be sure to look at their Interactive Timeline--especially Years in the Future. In trillions and trillions of years, we can expect an end to the Stellar Era, followed by a Degenerate Era, a Black Hole Era, and finally a Dark Era, when "for all intents and purposes, the universe as we know it has dissipated."

For students who might want to get some telescope time to look at the universe for themselves, see either Hands-On Universe's Asteroid Search project (hou.lbl.gov/research) or Telescopes in Education (tie.jpl.nasa.gov/tie), which uses an automated system to link students to a twenty-four-inch telescope atop Mount Wilson in southern California--the birthplace of modern cosmology.

Robert Anderson is a science writer living in Los Angeles.