Origins
Museums are full of fascinating objects from prehistoric times, but in
reality ancient vistas surround us daily, many of which will not fit in a
museum! We can literally look into the past through the skies of our own
backyards. The light of stars and galaxies take millions, even billions of
years to reach earth, so that what we see now is not the universe as it is
today, but rather as it was in the remote past. The familiar landscapes we
pass by daily represent chapters in the history of our Earth. These rocks
allow us to reconstruct the arrangement of the continents and the history of
the Earth. In the Origins gallery, voyage through the timeline of the
cosmos and discover major events in the history of planet Earth.
Origins Gallery
Cosmic microwave background, 13 billion years ago. NASA image.
Hubble deep field, to 12 billion light years distant.
NASA: R. Williams, The HDF Team (STScI)
Earth 4.6-3.8 billion years ago (Hadean Earth).
Journal of Cosmology, Volume 8, June 2010
“Impact:” formation of the moon, 4.5 billion years ago.
NASA image 2-1307 by Joe Tucciarone,
www.joetucciarone.com
Snowball Earth, 2.4 billion years ago.
Journal of Cosmology, Volume 8, June 2010
Grand Canyon, Inner Gorge, Vishnu Basement Rocks, 1.6-1.8 billion years ago.
USGS image
Young visitor contemplates Origins
Burgess Shale Fauna, Canada, 500 million years ago.
GEO86500_52d, http://fieldmuseum.org
Earth 470 million years ago (Middle Ordovician).
Ron Blakey, Colorado Plateau Geosystems,
http://cpgeosystems.com/
Life on Earth, 370 million years ago.
GEO86500_125d, http://fieldmuseum.org
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53 N. Macdonald
Mesa, AZ 85201
(One block north of Main Street in downtown Mesa. Take US 60 or 202 to
Country Club Drive, go to Main Street, and proceed one-half mile east to
Macdonald) -
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480-644-2230
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