History of the Universe

13.8 Ga – 10 Ga AP76 items

deep timespace
History of the Universe

13.8 billion years on one spine

From the Big Bang to the death of the Sun: the first stars and galaxies, the birth of the Solar System, four billion years of life on Earth, a few hundred thousand years of our own species, and the last five centuries in which we worked all of this out.

How it is laid out

  • Cosmic epochs (the dark ages, reionization, cosmic noon) frame the first ten billion years.

  • Eons and eras from the International Chronostratigraphic Chart frame Earth’s story. Snowball Earth, Pangaea and the ice ages overlap them.

  • After the present, the Sun’s future: a red giant, then a white dwarf.

Threads

Filter by cosmos, earth, life, extinction (the Big Five and the asteroid), humans or science. The science items are twins of older ones: Penzias and Wilson found the light the universe released at 380,000 years, and LIGO heard two black holes that merged 1.3 billion years ago.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. — Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

Deep-time dates are years before or after present (1950), with the uncertainty their sources give.

Items

  1. Cosmic dark ages

    ≈ 187 million years

  2. Big Bang

  3. Cosmic microwave background released

  4. Epoch of reionization

    ≈ 800 million years

  5. First stars

  6. Earliest galaxies seen by Webb

  7. Cosmic noon

    ≈ 3.5 billion years

  8. Gaia-Enceladus merges with the Milky Way

  9. Expansion starts to accelerate

  10. Hadean

    ≈ 536 million years

  11. Sun and Solar System form

  12. Earth forms

  13. Moon-forming impact

  14. Oldest known piece of Earth

    Jack Hills, Western Australia

  15. Archean

    ≈ 1.53 billion years

  16. Oldest widely accepted signs of life

    Dresser Formation, North Pole Dome, Pilbara

  17. Proterozoic

    ≈ 1.96 billion years

  18. Great Oxidation Event

  19. Boring billion

    ≈ 1 billion years

  20. Complex cells appear

  21. Two black holes merge

  22. Snowball Earth

    ≈ 85 million years

  23. Ediacaran life at Mistaken Point

    Mistaken Point, Newfoundland

  24. Paleozoic

    ≈ 287 million years

  25. Cambrian explosion

  26. Burgess Shale

    Walcott Quarry, Yoho National Park

  27. Plants move onto land

  28. End-Ordovician extinction

  29. Tiktaalik

    Southern Ellesmere Island, Nunavut

  30. Late Devonian extinction

  31. Pangaea

    ≈ 160 million years

  32. Mesozoic

    ≈ 186 million years

  33. Great Dying

  34. First dinosaurs

    Ischigualasto, San Juan, Argentina

  35. End-Triassic extinction

  36. Archaeopteryx

    Solnhofen limestone, Bavaria

  37. First flowering plants

  38. Cenozoic

  39. Chicxulub impact

    Chicxulub crater, Yucatán

  40. Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum

  41. Antarctica freezes over

  42. Toumaï

    Toros-Menalla, Djurab Desert, Chad

  43. Laetoli footprints

    Laetoli, Tanzania

  44. Earliest stone tools

    Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya

  45. Lucy

    Hadar, Afar, Ethiopia

  46. Isthmus of Panama closes

  47. Quaternary ice ages

  48. First humans outside Africa

    Dmanisi, Georgia

  49. Earliest firm evidence of fire

    Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape

  50. Oldest Homo sapiens

    Jebel Irhoud, Morocco

  51. Out of Africa

  52. Neanderthals disappear

  53. Chauvet Cave paintings

    Chauvet Cave, Ardèche

  54. Last Glacial Maximum

    7,500 years

  55. Holocene

  56. Göbekli Tepe

    Göbekli Tepe, Şanlıurfa

  57. Farming in the Fertile Crescent

  58. Writing in Sumer

    Uruk (Warka), Iraq

  59. Great Pyramid of Giza

    Great Pyramid, Giza

  60. Copernicus puts the Sun at the centre

  61. Galileo sees Jupiter’s moons

    Padua

  62. Laplace’s nebular hypothesis

  63. Andromeda turns out to be a galaxy

    Hooker telescope, Mount Wilson

  64. The universe is expanding

  65. Keeling starts measuring carbon dioxide

    Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii

  66. The Big Bang’s afterglow is found

    Holmdel Horn Antenna, New Jersey

  67. Apollo 11 lands on the Moon

  68. First planet around a Sun-like star

    Observatoire de Haute-Provence

  69. Accelerating expansion discovered

  70. Gravitational waves detected

  71. Crawford Lake proposed to mark the Anthropocene

    Crawford Lake, Ontario

  72. Earth’s oceans begin to boil away

  73. The Sun as a red giant

    ≈ 2.6 billion years

  74. Milky Way and Andromeda may collide

  75. Earth is probably swallowed

  76. The Sun becomes a white dwarf