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