Cosmic Times

Cosmic Times is a series of curriculum support materials that trace the history of our understanding of the universe during the past 100 years, from Einstein's formulation of gravity to the discovery of dark energy. It consists of 6 posters, each resembling the front page of a newspaper from a particular time in this history, with articles describing the discoveries. The language of the articles mimics that of a newspaper from its respective era.

Each poster is accompanied by 4-5 classroom lessons ranging from middle- to high-school and including at least on multi-disciplinary lesson. In addition, each poster has two associated newsletters – one with the text as it appears on the poster and one with differentiated text at a slightly lower reading level. Finally, this website also includes teacher's notes for each of the Cosmic Times articles.

1919 A solar eclipse confirms that Einstein's theory of gravity, not Newton's, correctly predicts the bending of starlight.

1929 Hubble builds on his earlier discovery that the Milky Way Galaxy is but one of many galaxies in our Universe to find that the Universe is expanding.

1955 The debate rages between whether the Big Bang and Steady State correctly describes the origin of the universe.

1965 Penzias and Wilson discover the Cosmic Microwave Background, the remnant radiation from the very early Universe, which makes the Big Bang the lead theory for the origin of the Universe.

1993 The COBE mission measures fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which explain where structure in our Universe comes from and confirming the role of inflation in the early universe.

2006 The supernova distance scale leads to the discovery of dark energy, a puzzling new component of our Universe that had been undetected until 1997, and its the nature remains a mystery in 2006.

Subscribe to the Cosmic Times news service to keep up-to-date with Cosmic Times materials and workshops.