Latest / Star Trails: From Backyard Astronomy to Cosmic Wonder / Eras of the Universe (Taylor’s Version)

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Eras of the Universe (Taylor’s Version) · Star Trails: From Backyard Astronomy to Cosmic Wonder

0:07
Howdy Star Gazers and welcome to Star Trails.
0:10
My name is Drew and I'll be your guide to the
0:13
night sky for the week of November 23rd to the
0:16
29th. This week we're doing something a little
0:20
different. We're mapping the entire history of
0:22
the universe onto Taylor Swift's musical eras.
0:26
It's part pop culture crossover, part cosmology
0:30
masterclass, and all grounded in real physics.
0:35
Later in the show, our night sky report includes
0:38
a delicate waxing crescent moon, Jupiter and
0:41
Saturn shining bright in the evening sky, and
0:44
a return of the winter constellations. I'll also
0:47
share a quick segment about the newest Hubble
0:50
mosaic of the Andromeda Galaxy. An image so detailed
0:55
you can zoom in and see individual stars in another
0:58
galaxy. Whether you're tuning in from the backyard
1:02
or the balcony, I'm glad you're here. So grab
1:05
a comfortable spot under the night sky and let's
1:08
get started. Listeners, I have a confession to
1:13
make. I'm a Swiftie. And tonight, we're making
1:17
the most scientifically accurate Taylor Swift
1:20
tribute in podcast history. This isn't a joke.
1:24
It's actually happening. Because when you really
1:30
look at it, the universe evolves through eras,
1:33
each with its own mood, color palette, and emotional
1:37
signature. And as it turns out, that maps all
1:41
too well onto Taylor Swift's discography. So,
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in honor of one of the real stars of our time,
1:48
and in mild violation of the Geneva Convention
1:51
on Cheesy Astronomy Metaphors, I proudly present
1:55
Eras of the Universe, Taylor's version. Look,
2:07
I know Taylor Swift might not be your cup of
2:10
tea, and if pop culture isn't your thing, that's
2:13
fine. Scientists use metaphors constantly. It's
2:17
how we talk about things too large or too small
2:20
to see directly. So if Taylor's eras help a few
2:24
more people understand dark energy or recombination,
2:28
that's a win for science. Also, I'm not just
2:32
making up this stuff. When we look deep into
2:34
space, we're looking back in time. the light
2:38
from distant galaxies has taken billions of years
2:41
to reach us. So the universe has already done
2:44
us the favor of preserving its childhood photos,
2:48
specifically in the form of the cosmic microwave
2:51
background. From a strictly scientific point
2:55
of view, cosmologists actually divide the universe
2:58
into four grand eras. The primordial era, the
3:03
stelliferous era, the Degenerate Era, and the
3:06
Dark Era. Basically a cosmic trilogy plus one
3:11
really bleak epilogue. Our Swiftie version highlights
3:15
these and adds some important sub -eras within
3:19
these larger swaths of time. That being said,
3:23
this episode is self -aware. It's kind of ridiculous,
3:27
maybe excessive, but it's also real science.
3:30
There's even a bit of a precedent for Taylor
3:32
and the cosmos, at least here in my hometown.
3:36
Our state museum's planetarium routinely runs
3:39
a Taylor Swift laser show, projecting images
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of guitars, hearts, and more across an accurate
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star field, while Taylor songs form the soundtrack.
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It always sells out and it is a sing -a -long.
3:54
So let's begin before Scooter Braun tries to
3:58
buy the rights to this concept. Every icon has
4:14
an origin story. In her self -titled debut, Taylor
4:18
started with a guitar and pure emotion. The universe
4:22
began with a big bang and a lot of plasma. Space
4:26
literally came into existence and outward expansion
4:30
began. This was the raw acoustic stage, just
4:34
hydrogen and helium trying to find their rhythm.
4:38
The cosmic microwave background is the teardrops
4:41
on my guitar of astrophysics. pure, unfiltered,
4:46
but honest. This era represents the first 300
4:53
,000 years post -Big Bang, all energy and expansion.
4:58
We call this process recombination. It was the
5:02
moment when the universe settled down, a sudden
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calm after the chaos of the Big Bang. This is
5:08
when free electrons finally latched onto nuclei
5:12
and made the first atoms. When that happened,
5:15
light broke free and filled the cosmos, creating
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the cosmic microwave background, the oldest light
5:23
we can see. A few hundred million years later,
5:35
the universe gets brave and has its first glow
5:38
-up, literally. The first stars ignite, flooding
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the dark with light. It's the love story phase,
5:46
an age of illumination and hope, when hydrogen
5:49
atoms and electrons just said yes to one another,
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combining under gravity. These first stars, called
5:57
population three stars, were enormous, hundreds
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of times the mass of the sun, burning hot and
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fast. Technically, the very first light was the
6:07
cosmic microwave background, but the universe's
6:10
first spotlight moment came when the stars switched
6:14
on for the first time. The cosmic dark age has
6:18
ended. Fusion began. It's bold. It's radiant.
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It's like Taylor's Fearless album. If you listen
6:25
closely, you can almost hear the universe strumming
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its first confident chord saying, you belong
6:30
with me in a galaxy someday. Taylor wrote Speak
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Now entirely by herself, a declaration of artistic
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independence. The universe around this time starts
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creating structure on its own terms. Galaxies,
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clusters, superclusters. This corresponds to
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the universe's first billion years when large
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-scale structure emerged. Matter gathers, forms
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stars and planets, and begins to sculpt the first
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grand designs, its creation by self -expression,
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the universe claiming authorship of its own story.
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Consider this the enchanted era. Everywhere you
7:28
looked, the universe whispered, please don't
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be in love with someone else, just collapse into
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a galaxy. Error 4, Red, The Age of Fire and Fury.
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This is where things get messy. Taylor's Red
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album was all about passion, heartbreak, and
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transformation, and so was the cosmos. Stars
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die in violent supernova, flinging their guts
8:02
across space, and forging heavier elements like
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carbon and iron. the building blocks of life
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and, incidentally, red lipstick. The light from
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these stellar deaths glows literally red, from
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heated gas and dust. It's cosmic chaos with emotional
8:21
depth, the I knew you were trouble phase of physics,
8:25
painful but essential, because from that heartbreak
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came everything we know. Supernova mark this
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age, every fiery end seeds the possibility of
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new worlds. Just as all too well became a ten
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-minute catharsis, these explosions turned pain
8:44
into a state of grace. Incidentally, these explosions
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forged all the gold in the cosmos. So every Swifty
8:53
friendship bracelet with a gold charm, well,
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that's brought to you by Red Era Explosive Drama.
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Error five, the structured shimmering chaos.
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Welcome to the pop era. Taylor's 1989 album was
9:15
polished, confident, crystalline, and so was
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the universe. Galaxies shook themselves off into
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grand spirals. Planetary systems formed with
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elegant geometry. The messy adolescence of cosmic
9:29
creation gave way to sleek order, the style of
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the stars. Welcome to the Virgo supercluster.
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By now, the universe is several billion years
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old and the Milky Way is a pop hit spinning reliably
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in 4 -4 time. Error 6 Black holes emerge. Then
10:00
came darkness, literally. In the Reputation album,
10:04
Taylor embraced her shadows, and so did the cosmos.
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Supermassive black holes dominated galaxy centers,
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shaping everything around them. Accretion discs
10:16
hotter than Taylor's tabloid drama. Look what
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you made me do could easily be the motto of any
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galaxy orbiting a black hole. Every space -time
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distortion is an act of control disguised as
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destruction. This is when feedback from active
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galactic nuclei defines star formation. Chaos
10:41
with boundaries, destruction as design. Quasars
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shooting jets light -years long, wreaking havoc.
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This is why we can't have nice things. After
11:05
the darkness comes the pastel. Taylor's Lover
11:09
album is the phase of cosmic domesticity. Stars
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in stable orbits. Planets cozying up around them.
11:16
Life beginning to bloom, soft nebula pinks, warm
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spiral arms, star formation leaning into slow
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burn romance. The chemistry of love becomes literal.
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Carbon chains, amino acids, and complex molecules
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start forming in interstellar clouds. The universe
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writes its first real love songs in molecular
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spectra lines instead of chords. Even dark matter
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was like, can I go where you go? This was cosmology's
11:50
homecoming dance. Error 8, the reflective universe.
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Every artist eventually turns inward. The universe,
12:03
now middle -aged, slows down. Star formation
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declines. Things got quieter, moodier, more acoustic.
12:11
Dwarf galaxies fade. Stars age into red giants
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and white dwarfs. Folklore and Evermore are Taylor's
12:21
indie albums. Less spectacle, more memory. Nebula
12:25
drift like melancholic chords. Ancient stars
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fade into embers. Gravity hums like Bon Iver
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in a flannel shirt. It's the cardigan -wearing
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phase of cosmic existence, reflective, nostalgic,
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a little haunted by what's gone, but grateful
12:44
for what remains. This is consequently the modern
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era of our universe, galaxies drifting apart,
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expansion accelerating, but new beauty still
12:59
emerging from decay. Light from distant galaxies
13:02
now takes billions of years to reach us. This
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represents the latter moments of the Stelliferous
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Age, the long, glorious middle chapter of the
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universe's life, the epoch where stars dominated
13:17
everything. It's the era where we, as humans,
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arrive in the universe. This era will last for
13:24
trillions of years, far longer than the universe
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has even existed up to now. which is around 13
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.8 billion years. To recap, up to this point
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in the evolution of the cosmos, galaxies have
13:37
formed and evolved. Stars are born, burn, and
13:40
even fade out. Planets form, heavy elements accumulate,
13:45
and life, at least once, emerges. Stars, or Stella,
13:50
are still the main actors. Their fusion furnaces
13:53
shape the chemistry of the universe. They lit
13:56
up galaxies, they made the heavy elements that
13:59
become planets, oceans, DNA, and microphones
14:03
used to record podcasts. Then comes Introspection,
14:26
the late -night confessional. The Midnight's
14:29
album represents cosmic self -awareness, the
14:32
universe realizing it's expanding faster than
14:35
it ever planned to. Dark energy drives galaxies
14:39
apart, while astrophysicists stare into the void
14:43
and they might hear a whisper saying, it's me,
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I, I'm the problem, it's entropy. The song You're
14:50
on Your Own Kid fits perfectly here. galaxies
14:54
receding, each glowing alone in the vast dark,
14:58
still bejeweled but increasingly isolated. The
15:02
expansion is accelerating, and the ultimate fate
15:05
of everything is uncertainty. Some galaxies are
15:09
receding from us even faster than the speed of
15:12
light, not because they're moving fast, but because
15:15
space itself is expanding. This acceleration
15:18
is already happening and it will shape the universe's
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long -term fate. Dark energy is the universe's
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deeply unhinged era, the one where it makes reckless
15:30
choices and refuses to explain itself. It's basically
15:34
the anti -hero and force of nature form. Error
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10 The Quantum Age and the Uncertain Future This
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is where it gets weird, both lyrically and physically.
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In the tortured poet's department, Taylor turned
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existential, layering self -reference and metaphor.
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The universe, meanwhile, retreats into quantum
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subtlety. Particles exist in superposition, both
16:08
here and not here, like Schrödinger's breakup
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text. The quantum world is messy, poetic, and
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brutally honest. The song Fortnite fits. Two
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moments overlapping in time, both true, neither
16:22
comfortable. Quantum fields rule the microcosm,
16:27
dictating how the macrocosm behaves. It's the
16:31
tortured poetry of physics itself. And finally,
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the curtain call. Taylor's latest era celebrates
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performance, spectacle, and survival, the endless
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concert. This is the life of a showgirl era.
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The universe, too, will have its final bow, trillions
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of years from now. As the last stars fade, white
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dwarfs glow briefly, black holes evaporate, and
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the cosmos performs one last glittering encore.
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It's elegant, tragic, and strangely glamorous.
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The alchemy of energy turning into emptiness.
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This is the far future heat death when entropy
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finally wins and the lights go out. The last
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black hole evaporates in a spark of hawking radiation,
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a final glittering bow. The universe does, indeed,
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do it with a broken heart. Thanks for joining
17:36
me for the most chaotic astronomy crossover episode
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imaginable. If we zoom out far enough, Taylor
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Swift and the cosmos tell the same story. Creation,
17:47
chaos, reinvention, reflection, both live through
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eras. Both leave Easter eggs for future observers,
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and both prove that change, no matter how dramatic,
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is how art and energy survive. While the metaphors
18:03
might be silly, keep in mind every atom in you
18:07
once glowed in a red -era supernova. Every breath
18:11
you take is borrowed from lover -era chemistry.
18:15
We're all tracks on the universe's album. And
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as you look up at the night sky this week, remember
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you're seeing the ultimate greatest hits album,
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the universe, spanning billions of years, still
18:27
glowing from its earliest tracks. After a quick
18:31
break, we'll listen or rather look at the night
18:34
sky and see what it holds for us in the coming
18:37
week. Stay with us. Welcome back. Before we get
18:54
into this week's night sky, I wanted to mention
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something intriguing I stumbled upon the other
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day. The Hubble composite of the Andromeda galaxy,
19:04
which was released earlier this year. Normally
19:07
when we talk about deep sky objects we often
19:10
think of a faint, fuzzy galaxy where the stars
19:13
blur into a mist of light. Hubble's new M31 mosaic
19:18
consists of 600 individual frames stitched together
19:22
to create an image containing billions of pixels.
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But it's not the size and beauty of the image
19:29
that makes it remarkable. It's what you see when
19:32
you zoom into it. For the first time, in a galaxy
19:36
outside our own, you can see individual stars.
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not clusters, not smears of blended starlight,
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but actual solitary stars, hundreds of millions
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of them, each a tiny point of light shining across
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two and a half million light years of space.
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And here's what always blows my mind. Each one
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of those points could be a sun. Each one might
20:01
have its own solar system, its own planets, its
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own little worlds orbiting in silence. We're
20:07
looking at a neighboring galaxy and seeing the
20:09
stellar equivalent of faraway city lights. Andromeda,
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this fuzzy smudge we can see with the naked eye,
20:17
is suddenly revealed to be a sprawling metropolis
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of stars, billions of them, each one potentially
20:23
with its own story, its own family of worlds,
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its own physics, chemistry, atmospheres, its
20:30
own eras. And here's where the scale really hits.
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Andromeda is just one galaxy. The observable
20:38
universe might contain two trillion galaxies,
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maybe more, each one with hundreds of billions
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of stars. Hubble's zoom into Andromeda gives
20:48
us a way to emotionally grasp that scale. Check
20:52
it out for yourself. I'll leave a link to the
20:55
zoomable mosaic in the show notes. We're coming
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off a new moon back on November the 20th, which
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means the first half of this week features a
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thin, delicate, waxing crescent. The kind of
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moon that looks like it's been painted on with
21:16
a single brush stroke. From Sunday through Thursday,
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that crescent will hang low in the southwestern
21:22
sky after sunset, slowly growing each night.
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This is a good time to spot earth shine, that
21:29
soft glow lighting up the dark side of the moon's
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disk. By Friday, we reach first quarter. That
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classic half -moon will be high in the south
21:39
during the evening. On Saturday, the moon tips
21:42
just past half into a waxing gibbous, bright
21:45
enough to start washing out fainter galaxies,
21:48
but still excellent for lunar detail. Let's take
21:52
a tour of the planetary lineup. Right after dusk,
21:56
look toward the southeast for the soft golden
21:58
star. That's Saturn, still lingering in our evening
22:02
skies. It's higher by mid -evening and sits beautifully
22:06
in small telescopes. Though the rings are tilted
22:09
so narrowly this year, they look like a razor
22:12
-thin line slicing across the planet. A little
22:15
later, bright Jupiter climbs up in the east -northeast,
22:19
shining near the twin stars Castor and Pollux
22:22
in Gemini. Through a small telescope, you can
22:25
check out its four Galilean moons. They shift
22:28
positions from night to night, a dance we get
22:31
to watch in real time. For telescope owners,
22:34
Uranus is the subtle show -stealer of the week.
22:38
It just passed opposition a few days ago, which
22:40
means it's visible all night and as bright as
22:43
it gets, which is to say not very bright, around
22:46
magnitude 5 .5. You'll find it in Taurus, not
22:50
far from the Pleiades and the V -shaped Hyades
22:54
star cluster. Through binoculars, it shows up
22:57
as a tiny, cold blue dot. Fainter still is Neptune,
23:02
which you'll need binoculars or a telescope to
23:05
see. It's higher up later in the evening, near
23:08
the border of Aquarius and Pisces, appearing
23:11
as a tiny bluish star. In the pre -dawn hours,
23:16
Venus is fading low toward the southeast, much
23:19
harder to spot now. Mercury and Mars are technically
23:22
in the morning sky too, but buried in the dawn
23:25
twilight. We'll catch them in better visibility
23:28
another week. The Leonid meteor shower peaked
23:31
last week, but it remains active into early December.
23:35
You may catch a few stray Leonids in the pre
23:38
-dawn hours. These are fast, bright streaks radiating
23:42
from the constellation Leo. This week is that
23:45
transition when the autumn constellations are
23:48
still high overhead, while the winter giants
23:51
are just beginning to rise. To the north and
23:54
overhead, you'll see the Great Square of Pegasus
23:57
and the Chain of Andromeda. This is a perfect
23:59
time to hunt down the Andromeda Galaxy. It's
24:03
a faint, elongated glow in binoculars. Nearby,
24:07
the double U shape of Cassiopeia is high and
24:10
bright. From there, you can hop down to the double
24:13
cluster in Perseus, a fan favorite for binocular
24:17
stargazers. In the east, the constellation Taurus
24:21
is rising with the bright orange star Aldebaran,
24:24
the Hyades, and the glittering Pleiades. And
24:27
late in the evening, the unmistakable shape of
24:30
Orion crawls over the horizon, announcing the
24:33
return of winter. Take a moment to explore the
24:36
Orion Nebula, M42, a glowing cradle of star formation
24:41
hanging below Orion's belt. If you only get one
24:46
clear night this week, here's a simple observation
24:48
plan. In the early evening, catch the thin crescent
24:51
moon in the southwest, then swing over to Saturn
24:54
as twilight deepens. By mid -evening, watch Jupiter
24:59
rise in the east, then tour Taurus. Visit the
25:02
Pleiades, trace the Hyades, and see if you can
25:05
spot Uranus with binoculars. As we enter the
25:09
late evening, look for Orion, and wrap up your
25:11
night with a look at the Orion Nebula. That's
25:15
going to do it for this week. I'll return with
25:17
some hardcore science in the next episode, which
25:20
will close our season. I'm going to take December
25:24
off like I did last year, although if any good
25:27
space news comes up, I'll let you know with a
25:29
special episode. As always, if you're a fan of
25:33
Star Trails, please share it with a friend who
25:35
might enjoy it. The easiest way to do that is
25:38
by sending folks to our website, StarTrails .Show.
25:42
And if you want to support the show, use the
25:45
link on the site to buy me a coffee. It really
25:48
helps. Be sure to follow Star Trails on Blue
25:51
Sky and YouTube. Links are in the show notes.
25:55
Until we meet again beneath the stars, clear
25:58
skies everyone.