Birth of the Milky Way

13.8 billion years back · 10 billion ahead · 19 chapters · 8 traditions

Birth of the Milky Way

How our galaxy was made and where it is going, told by the science, with the words the world’s traditions have used for the same story.

Scroll to rewind to before the beginning ↓

Act I · How it was made

  1. IBefore the beginningBefore 10⁻⁴³ seconds
  2. IIInflation13.8 billion years ago
  3. IIIFirst matter13.8 billion years ago
  4. IVFirst light13.8 billion years ago
  5. VThe Dark Ages13.8 to 13.6 billion years ago
  6. VICosmic dawn~13.6 billion years ago
  7. VIISeeds of the Milky Way~13.5 to 12.5 billion years ago
  8. VIIIAn early collision~12 billion years ago
  9. IXGaia-Enceladus~10 billion years ago
  10. XThe disk settles~10 to 8 billion years ago
  11. XIThe Sun is born4.567 billion years ago
  12. XIIStreams and spills~6 billion years ago to today
  13. XIIIThe Milky Way todayToday

Act II · The next 10 billion years

  1. XIVThe brightening SunNow to ~1.5 billion years
  2. XVThe Magellanic collisionIn ~1.3 to 2.4 billion years
  3. XVIAndromeda draws nearFirst close pass in ~4.5 billion years
  4. XVIIThe Sun becomes a red giantIn ~5.5 to 7.7 billion years
  5. XVIIIMilkomeda, or aloneIn ~6 to 10 billion years, or not at all
  6. XIXTen billion years onIn 10 billion years, and beyond

Eight lenses

How to read this

The science runs down the page as the spine of the story. Beside each chapter sit passages from the world’s traditions that echo it. The pairings are thematic. No text here is presented as having predicted a scientific finding, and none is forced to agree with the others. Switch any tradition on or off with the buttons at the top.

Abrahamic34 passages

Judaism, Christianity and Islam, together with the Latter-day Saint Restoration and the Baháʼí Faith, trace their faith to the God of Abraham. They share the conviction that the cosmos is the deliberate work of one Creator, brought into being by word, separation and ordering. Around their scriptures stand centuries of commentary that read creation literally, figuratively, philosophically and mystically, and some of their own thinkers, from Augustine to the priest-physicist Georges Lemaître, helped shape how we think about time and cosmic beginnings.

Reading notes
  • These pairings set texts side by side; they are not proofs. No entry claims that a scripture predicted a scientific finding. 'Scientific miracle' readings (for example of Qur'an 21:30 or 51:47) and concordist readings of Genesis are disputed inside the traditions themselves, so present them as one view among several.
  • Every tradition holds a range of readings: literal, figurative, mystical and philosophical. Young-earth and old-earth views exist among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Avoid captions like 'Muslims/Christians/Jews believe X' when only some do.
  • The traditions do not agree on creation. Creation from nothing (ex nihilo) is the classical teaching of most of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Latter-day Saint teaching holds creation from eternal, pre-existing element (ex materia), and Baháʼí teaching holds that creation as a whole has no beginning. Show these differences without ranking them.
  • Verbatim quotes come from public-domain translations: the KJV, E. H. Palmer's Qur'an (1880), Dods' Augustine, 19th-century LDS texts, Barney's 1908 Some Answered Questions and a 1901 Talmud anthology. Their wording is dated. Muslims regard only the Arabic as the Qur'an and any translation as an interpretation. Palmer was a Victorian orientalist, not a Muslim scholar.
  • Qur'an references use the standard Cairo (Hafs) numbering. Palmer's edition follows Flügel's numbering, which in places is a verse or more off (for example, his 2:117 falls around his verse 111).
  • Terminology: say 'Hebrew Bible' rather than 'Old Testament' in Jewish contexts, 'Latter-day Saint' or 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' rather than 'Mormon', and spell 'Baháʼí' with its diacritics. In the Qur'an the divine 'We' is a royal plural, not a plurality of gods.
  • Visuals: do not depict God, the Prophet Muhammad or other prophets (many Muslims object to images of prophets, and Baháʼís reserve images of Baháʼu'lláh for special settings). Do not use sacred names such as the Tetragrammaton as decoration.
  • Kabbalistic ideas (tzimtzum, the shattering of the vessels) are metaphysical and ethical teachings, not physical theories. Apocalyptic texts (Revelation, Qur'anic descriptions of the Last Hour) are read by believers as statements about judgment and renewal, not as astronomical forecasts.

Dharmic24 passages

Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh traditions share a sense of immense time, of worlds that arise and dissolve in cycles, and of many worlds beyond our own. They disagree sharply on whether the cosmos was created at all. The Rig Veda asks whether anyone knows how it began. The Puranas describe a golden world-egg and days of Brahmā lasting billions of years. Buddhist and Jain teachers describe a cosmos with no first moment that can be found, and Sikh scripture speaks of creation from one divine Word whose timing only the Creator knows.

Reading notes
  • These are four separate religions, each with internal diversity. Jains and Buddhists explicitly reject a creator god, Sikhs affirm one Creator, and Hindu texts contain many cosmogonies that sometimes contradict each other.
  • The numerical parallels (a day of Brahmā of about 4.32 billion years, and Carl Sagan's remark in Cosmos) are coincidences of scale, not observation.
  • The churned 'Ocean of Milk' is not the Milky Way in the texts; in Indic tradition the Milky Way is the heavenly Ganges (Ākāśagaṅgā).
  • The quoted translations are colonial-era scholarship with archaic and sometimes contested wording.
  • Gurbani is held in particular reverence; English renderings are one translation among many.

East Asian18 passages

East Asian cosmogonies usually describe the world as unfolding rather than being made from nothing. An undifferentiated chaos, often pictured as an egg, separates: light, clear qi rises as heaven and heavy, turbid qi settles as earth, as yin and yang part. Daoist classics speak of a Way older than heaven and earth. Across the region the Milky Way is a river in the sky, the Silver River or River of Heaven, with the Weaver and the Cowherd on opposite banks.

Reading notes
  • Chinese, Japanese and Korean traditions are distinct, though Japanese and Korean texts often borrowed Chinese cosmological language.
  • Pangu is first attested only in the 3rd century CE, and scholars debate where the myth came from.
  • The Dao of the Daodejing is not a creator deity.
  • The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki myths were later used to support imperial ideology; read them with that history in mind.
  • Qi, yin and yang are not equivalent to matter, energy or forces; parallels are thematic only.

Near East & Mediterranean28 passages

In the oldest written creation accounts, from Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome, the world begins as dark waters or a yawning gap. It is then divided, put in order and lit, often after a battle between gods. The same region gave us the word 'galaxy', from the Greek for milk, and the earliest recorded guess that the Milky Way is made of stars.

Reading notes
  • These are many separate traditions spread over roughly 3,000 years, each with several versions.
  • No Egyptian text clearly names the Milky Way; linking Nut to it is a modern scholarly proposal (Graur 2024).
  • The Bundahishn was compiled in the 9th century CE from older Zoroastrian tradition, and Zoroastrianism is a living faith.
  • 'Gaia-Enceladus' is a name modern astronomers took from Greek myth; the myth does not describe the merger.

Northern Europe18 passages

The Norse poems and Snorri's Prose Edda describe a yawning gap between fire and ice, a world built from the body of the first giant, and a cosmos that burns and then rises green from the sea. In the Finnish Kalevala, sky, sun, moon and stars come from a broken egg. Across the Finnic and Baltic north, the Milky Way itself was a road: the path of migrating birds.

Reading notes
  • The Norse sources were written down in Christian Iceland in the 13th century, and modern Heathens still practise this religion.
  • The Kalevala is Elias Lönnrot's 19th-century compilation of oral runes, not one ancient scripture.
  • No surviving Norse myth explains where the Milky Way came from; 'Vetrarbraut' (winter way) is a name, not a story.

Indigenous Americas18 passages

From the K'iche' Maya highlands to the Andes, the Plains and the Southwest, Indigenous nations of the Americas have seen the Milky Way as a road for spirits, a river, a world tree, and a trail of spilled cornmeal or scattered stars. These are many separate traditions. They were recorded in very different ways: some by colonial-era priests, some by early anthropologists, and some shared today by Native knowledge keepers. Each belongs to its own people.

Reading notes
  • Name the specific nation every time (K'iche', Mexica, Quechua, Cherokee, Lakota, Diné, Hopi). Never use a generic 'Native American' voice.
  • Many sources were filtered through colonial or missionary writers (Molina, Mendieta, Sahagún, Brasseur de Bourbourg via Spence), so Christian framing may have crept in.
  • Diné star stories, including Black God and Coyote placing the stars, are traditionally told only in winter (roughly first frost to first thunder). Consider noting this in the UI.
  • The well-known scheme of Hopi 'successive worlds' destroyed by fire, ice and flood comes mainly from Frank Waters' Book of the Hopi (1963), which many Hopi have criticized. Voth's earlier texts describe an emergence from a troubled lower world instead.
  • Readings that tie Maya imagery to the Milky Way (World Tree, dark rift as the Road to Xibalba) and the Mexica Huitzilopochtli story to sun, moon and stars are modern scholarly reconstructions, and they are debated.
  • Avoid any '2012 / Maya prophecy' framing.

Oceania & Australia19 passages

In Polynesia and Aboriginal Australia the sky is kin and Country. Māori genealogies run from the void through long ages of night into the world of light. A Hawaiian chant begins in the heat and turning of the heavens. Aboriginal nations read the dark lanes of the Milky Way as an emu and its glow as a sky-river lined with campfires. Aboriginal Australia alone holds hundreds of nations, each with its own language, law and sky.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this lens may contain names of people who have died.

Reading notes
  • Aboriginal astronomical knowledge has many levels. Only use stories published openly with community involvement. Never include secret, sacred or gender-restricted material; for example, many Pleiades stories are women's knowledge.
  • Credit specific nations (Kamilaroi, Euahlayi, Kaurna, Yolŋu, Wardaman, Boorong). Note that versions vary between communities and that some published sources name people who have passed away.
  • Colonial-era recorders (Stanbridge, Parker, Best, Grey) wrote through settler lenses. Where possible, pair them with Indigenous-led or co-authored sources (Te Ara by Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal; Fuller, Anderson et al.; Bill Yidumduma Harney).
  • Māori creation traditions differ between iwi (tribes). Te Ara notes several tribal sequences of Te Kore, Te Pō and Te Ao.
  • Use macrons and diacritics correctly (Tāne, Papatūānuku, Te Ao Mārama, Yolŋu, Liliʻuokalani).

Africa15 passages

Africa holds thousands of peoples and cosmologies. This lens draws on a handful of well-documented ones: the |xam San of South Africa, the Zulu, the Yoruba of West Africa and the Kuba (Bushoong) of Congo. For a |xam girl of the early race, the Milky Way began as wood ashes thrown into the sky to light people home. Across southern Africa it is named the backbone of the night.

Reading notes
  • Do not present any single story as 'the African creation myth'. Name the people and region each time.
  • Most of the public-domain texts were recorded by colonial-era Europeans (Bleek & Lloyd, Callaway, Ellis), though Bleek & Lloyd and Callaway preserve the words of named Indigenous narrators. Credit those narrators where possible, for example ||kabbo, |hanǂkass'o, Umpengula Mbanda.
  • Dogon: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen's claims of Dogon knowledge of Sirius B are disputed. Walter van Beek's 1991 restudy found no trace of that lore among Dogon informants. Leave it out or frame it explicitly as contested ethnography, never as 'ancient knowledge'.
  • Ancient Egyptian material (Nut and the Milky Way) is not included here, to avoid overlapping with any Near East or Egypt lens.
  • Unkulunkulu's status as 'creator' and Ellis's account of Yoruba gods are shaped by missionary-era interpretation. Yoruba traditions also vary from town to town.

IBefore t ≈ 10⁻⁴³ s

Before the beginning

Where known physics runs out

Run cosmic expansion backward and everything converges on a state of extreme heat and density about 13.8 billion years ago. But inside roughly the first 10⁻⁴³ seconds (the Planck time), gravity and quantum effects matter equally, and no tested theory handles both at once, so our equations stop being trustworthy. Stephen Hawking argued that time itself may begin there: 'There is nothing south of the South Pole, so there was nothing around before the Big Bang.' Other physicists explore bouncing, cyclic or eternally inflating universes that do have a past, and a 2003 theorem by Borde, Guth and Vilenkin shows that inflation by itself cannot extend infinitely into the past. None of these ideas has been confirmed by observation; the honest answer is that we do not yet know.

How we know

We don't, and the limit is a theoretical one: general relativity and quantum theory conflict at the Planck scale. The only foreseeable observational window, a faint swirl ('B-mode' polarization) that primordial gravitational waves would leave in the cosmic microwave background, has not been detected.

  • Planck time: 5.39 × 10⁻⁴⁴ s (CODATA 2022), the scale below which known physics breaks down
  • Everything we can trace converges about 13.8 billion years ago
  • Primordial gravitational waves: not detected (tensor-to-scalar ratio r < 0.036 at 95% confidence, BICEP/Keck 2021)
  • Tested theories of quantum gravity: none yet

LatestSeptember 2026: the Simons Observatory in Chile reported that its two mid-frequency (90 and 150 GHz) small-aperture telescopes, built to hunt for the B-mode signature of primordial gravitational waves (the closest thing to a direct signal from the inflationary era), are beating their baseline sensitivity targets. This is an instrument milestone, not a detection.

Sources: Planck units (CODATA 2022 Planck time; Planck epoch) - Wikipedia · ScienceAlert: Stephen Hawking explains what existed before the Big Bang (South Pole quote, 2018) · Borde, Guth & Vilenkin, 'Inflationary spacetimes are not past-complete', PRL 90, 151301 (2003) · The Simons Observatory: Commissioning of the Mid-Frequency Small Aperture Telescopes (arXiv, Sept 2026)

Shared thread

The void before

Almost every account starts with something that is not yet anything: Babylon’s unnamed waters, the Norse yawning gap, the Māori Te Kore, the Rig Veda’s state that was neither existent nor non-existent. Some traditions decline to name a beginning at all; the Buddha calls it beyond reckoning, and Jain teaching calls the universe uncreated. Physics reaches the same edge from its own side: below about 10⁻⁴³ seconds its equations stop working.

In the traditions

Christianity

Made with time, not in time

“the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.”

Marcus Dods (tr.), The City of God (1871; repr. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers I/2, 1887), Book XI, ch. 6 · newadvent.org ↗

Many cosmologists likewise treat the Big Bang as the start of time as we can measure it, not as an event inside time that already existed, though whether anything came 'before' is still an open question in physics.

Context

Augustine argues that time is the measure of change and motion, so there was no empty 'before' in which God waited to create; the world and time began together. He tackles the same puzzle ('what was God doing before creation?') in Confessions XI.

Jewish mysticism

The withdrawal that made room

In Luria's teaching, the infinite divine light (Ein Sof) first contracts or withdraws, opening a vacated space (ḥalal panuy) that keeps only a trace (reshimu) of the light, so that finite worlds can exist. Interpreters disagree over whether tzimtzum is literal or figurative. Much Hasidic thought reads it as a veiling of God's presence as finite minds perceive it, not a change in God's essence.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

Tzimtzum pictures creation beginning with the making of an emptiness in which something can unfold, which sits beside the physicist's question of what 'nothing' means before the universe.

Baháʼí

A creation without beginning

“The Universe Is Without Beginning”

ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, collected and tr. Laura Clifford Barney (1908), title of ch. XLVII · archive.org ↗

Within the Abrahamic family this is a counterpoint. It echoes scientific proposals (eternal inflation, cyclic or 'bouncing' models) in which the Big Bang need not be the absolute beginning of everything, which is still an open question.

Context

Baháʼí scripture teaches that God’s creation has always existed and always will. Baháʼu'lláh writes that the name Creator presupposes a creation (Gleanings LXXVIII); ʻAbdu'l-Bahá adds that a creator without a creature is impossible, while individual worlds come into being by composition and pass away by decomposition. Creation’s eternity is distinct from God’s: creation is dependent, and God alone needs nothing.

Hindu (Rig Veda)

Neither Existent nor Non-existent

“Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. … Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.”

Ralph T. H. Griffith (1896), The Hymns of the Rig Veda, 10.129.1, 10.129.3 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Cosmology still treats 'what came before the Big Bang' as an open and possibly meaningless question, and the hymn leaves the same question honestly open.

Context

The hymn describes a state before being and non-being, without sky, death, or day and night, in which 'That One' breathed without breath. Desire then arises as the first seed of mind. It ends by questioning whether even the highest overseer knows how creation came about.

Buddhist

A Beginning Beyond Reckoning

“Incalculable is the beginning, brethren, of this faring on. The earliest point is not revealed of the running on, the faring on, of beings cloaked in ignorance, tied to craving.”

Mrs. Rhys Davids & F. L. Woodward (1922), The Book of the Kindred Sayings, Part II, SN 15.1 · buddhadust.net ↗

Physicists debate whether time has a first moment at all; the Buddha's deliberate refusal to speculate is a different response to a question that is similarly hard to answer.

Context

The Buddha teaches that no first point can be found in saṃsāra, the round of rebirth. Strictly this is about the wandering of beings, not the physical universe. Elsewhere (MN 63) he declines to say whether the world is eternal or finite, because such speculation does not lead to liberation.

Chinese (Daoist)

Before Heaven and Earth

“There was something undefined and complete, coming into existence before Heaven and Earth. How still it was and formless, standing alone, and undergoing no change”

James Legge (1891), The Tâo Teh King (SBE 39), ch. 25 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Physicists asking what underlies the Big Bang reach for something formless and lawlike rather than a 'thing'; the Daodejing poses that question in its own terms.

Context

Laozi describes something formless and complete that existed before heaven and earth, 'the mother of all things', which he calls Dao, the Way. The Dao is not a personal creator, and commentators debate whether 'before' means earlier in time or more fundamental.

Babylonian

When heaven was not named

“When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsû, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both,—
Their waters were mingled together,”

L. W. King (1902), The Seven Tablets of Creation, Tablet I, lines 1–5 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Like the earliest moment cosmology can describe, this beginning has no distinct things in it, only an undivided state that later separates into named parts.

Context

The Babylonian epic Enuma Elish opens before anything had a name. There are only two mingled primordial waters, Apsû (fresh water) and Tiamat (salt water), from which the first generations of gods are later born.

Zoroastrian

Empty space between light and dark

“Aharman in darkness, with backward understanding and desire for destruction, was in the abyss ... And between them was empty space, that is, what they call 'air,' in which is now their meeting.”

E. W. West (1880), Pahlavi Texts Part I (SBE 5), Bundahis I.3–4 · sacred-texts.com ↗

It pictures an emptiness waiting to be filled, much as this chapter asks what, if anything, preceded space and time.

Context

The Zoroastrian account of creation starts with two opposed realms: Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazda) in endless light above, and the destructive spirit Ahriman in darkness below. An empty void lies between them, and that void is where their struggle will happen.

Norse

A yawning gap

“Of old was the age when Ymir lived;
Sea nor cool waves nor sand there were;
Earth had not been, nor heaven above,
But a yawning gap, and grass nowhere.”

Henry Adams Bellows (1923), The Poetic Edda, Voluspo 3 · sacred-texts.com ↗

A great open emptiness with no sea and no sky is the Norse way of imagining the 'before' that cosmology cannot directly observe.

Context

The seeress of the Völuspá recalls a time before sea, earth or sky existed. There was only Ginnungagap, the 'yawning gap', in the age of the primeval giant Ymir.

K'iche' Maya

Wind over the primeval night

“Over a universe wrapped in the gloom of a dense and primeval night passed the god Hurakan, the mighty wind.”

Lewis Spence (1908), The Popol Vuh: The Mythic and Heroic Sagas of the Kichés of Central America, 'The First Book' · gutenberg.org ↗

Like the scientific 'before', this is a state without form or structure. It is described as darkness and stillness rather than as a place or a time.

Context

The K'iche' Popol Vuh opens before anything exists except darkness, stillness and water, with the creator powers moving over it. Spence's 1908 version is a condensed retelling. Fuller modern translations stress the silence and emptiness of the sky and sea.

Māori

Te Kore, the void

Many Māori genealogies of creation begin with Te Kore, “nothingness, the void,” which many Māori thinkers describe as a state of potential rather than simple emptiness. From it the world moves through Te Pō (night) toward Te Ao (the world of day). Tribal versions differ in their sequence and names.

Paraphrase · teara.govt.nz ↗

Te Kore as a void full of potential parallels how physicists describe the state before the Big Bang: not a place or a thing.

Kuba (Bushoong), Congo

Mbombo alone in darkness

In the Kuba (Bushoong) account, the creator Mbombo (also called Bumba) was alone in darkness, with nothing but primordial water. Seized with pain, he vomited out the sun, then the moon and stars, then animals and people. The sun's heat dried the water into land. Details vary between tellings.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

A beginning of only darkness and formless water parallels the scientific theme of a featureless state before any structure existed.

II13.8 billion years ago

Inflation

Space inflates in an instant

About 13.8 billion years ago, the matter and energy of our entire observable universe was packed into a state hotter and denser than anything that exists today. In the leading theory, cosmic inflation, space itself then expanded by a factor of at least 10²⁶ in a tiny fraction of a second, everywhere at once rather than outward from a center. Inflation would have stretched microscopic quantum jitters to cosmic size, freezing them in as faint ripples of slightly higher and lower density. When inflation ended, its energy flooded space with hot particles (the 'hot Big Bang'), and those ripples became the seeds of every later structure, including the patch that would become the Milky Way. Inflation fits the evidence remarkably well but is not proven: its predicted gravitational waves have not been seen, and what drove it is unknown.

How we know

Inflation's predictions match the cosmic microwave background: a spatially flat universe and primordial ripples of almost equal strength on all scales, with a small measured tilt (n_s = 0.965 ± 0.004, Planck 2018). The age comes from fitting the standard cosmological model (ΛCDM) to Planck's CMB maps, and the 2025 Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) data independently confirm it.

  • Age of the universe: 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years (Planck 2018)
  • Inflation: thought to begin around 10⁻³⁶ s and end by about 10⁻³³ to 10⁻³² s (model-dependent)
  • Expansion during inflation: at least about 10²⁶-fold
  • Primordial ripples: about 1 part in 100,000 in strength
  • Spectral tilt n_s = 0.965 ± 0.004 (Planck 2018); 0.974 ± 0.003 (ACT DR6 + Planck + DESI, 2025)

LatestMarch 2025: final (DR6) data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, combined with Planck and DESI, gave a slightly higher spectral tilt (n_s = 0.974 ± 0.003) and confirmed the 13.8-billion-year age to about 0.1%. The higher tilt puts mild pressure on some popular inflation models, such as the Starobinsky model, without ruling inflation out.

Sources: Planck Collaboration, 'Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters' (A&A 641, A6, 2020) · Inflationary epoch - Wikipedia (timing; ≥10²⁶ expansion, citing Ryden, Introduction to Cosmology) · ACT DR6: Power Spectra, Likelihoods and ΛCDM Parameters (Louis et al., March 2025) · APS Physics: BICEP/Keck tightens limit on primordial gravitational waves (r < 0.036, 2021)

Shared thread

A seed, an egg, a word

The beginning is often pictured as something small and complete that opens: a golden embryo, Night’s egg in the deeps of Erebus, a single word that sets the world expanding. In 1931 a Catholic priest and physicist, Georges Lemaître, gave science its own version, the “primeval atom,” which grew into Big Bang theory.

In the traditions

Hebrew Bible

In the beginning

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

King James Version (1611; standard 1769 text), Genesis 1:1 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

Big Bang cosmology finds that the universe has a finite age of about 13.8 billion years, which echoes the idea of a single cosmic beginning as a shared theme, not a shared detail.

Context

These are the opening words of the Torah and the Bible. The Hebrew bereshit can be read 'In the beginning God created…' or, following Rashi and many modern translators, 'When God began to create…', and the choice affects whether the verse names an absolute first moment.

Rabbinic Judaism

A point with no substance

Ramban explains that from absolute nothing God first brought forth a very fine primordial matter, without bodily form but full of potential, which the Greeks called hyle, and that everything else was then formed from it. He likens that first creation to a tiny point lacking substance. The often-repeated claim that he compared it to a mustard seed does not appear in his Genesis 1:1 commentary; it comes from modern retellings.

Paraphrase · sefaria.org ↗

His picture of everything emerging from a nearly dimensionless, formless beginning is often set beside the hot, dense early universe. The likeness is one of imagery: Ramban worked from medieval philosophy, not observation.

Christianity

The priest's primeval atom

Lemaître, a Belgian physicist ordained a Catholic priest in 1923, derived an expanding universe from general relativity in 1927. In 1931 he proposed that it began from a single 'primeval atom', the seed of Big Bang theory. When Pius XII linked the theory to creation in a 1951 address, Lemaître, who kept physics and theology methodologically separate, helped persuade the Pope to stop presenting it as support for doctrine.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

This is a direct thread rather than a parallel: a man of faith helped originate the scientific account this chapter tells, while insisting that the physics stand on its own evidence.

Islam

We give it ample space

“And the heaven—we have built it with might, and, verily, we do surely give it ample space!”

E. H. Palmer (tr.), The Qur'an (1880), Sura 51:47 · sacred-texts.com ↗

A heaven built and made ever more spacious sits beside cosmology's discovery that space itself expands. Believers read this resonance differently, and it is not a consensus claim.

Context

The verse says God built the heaven with might and that 'We are mūsiʿūn', which can be rendered 'We make it vast', 'We are expanding it' or 'We have ample power'. Classical commentators such as Ibn Kathir read it as God's power to make the sky vast and lofty. Many modern Muslim writers read it as the expanding universe, and others caution against reading modern science into scripture.

Hindu (Rig Veda)

The Golden Embryo

“In the beginning rose Hiranyagarbha, born Only Lord of all created beings. He fixed and holdeth up this earth and heaven.”

Ralph T. H. Griffith (1896), The Hymns of the Rig Veda, 10.121.1 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Like the hot, dense state at the start of the Big Bang, the hymn pictures everything emerging from one luminous seed, as an image rather than a mechanism.

Context

Hiraṇyagarbha, the 'golden embryo' or 'golden womb', arises first and becomes lord of all, and verse 7 says the mighty waters held 'the universal germ'. The Laws of Manu later develop the image into a golden egg 'in brilliancy equal to the sun'.

Sikh

One Word, a Vast Expanse

“By one word Thou didst effect the expansion of the world, Whereby hundreds of thousands of rivers were produced.”

Max Arthur Macauliffe (1909), The Sikh Religion, Vol. I, Japji, pauri 16 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Cosmology also traces everything to a single beginning followed by expansion, though it describes that beginning in physical terms rather than as a Word.

Context

Guru Nanak says the whole expanse of creation came from a single Word (kavāo) of the one Creator. In pauri 21 he adds that no scholar knows the time, season or month when the world was made; only the Creator who made it knows.

Chinese (Daoist)

One, Two, Three, All Things

“The Tao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things.”

James Legge (1891), The Tâo Teh King (SBE 39), ch. 42 · sacred-texts.com ↗

The universe also unfolds from a single undivided state through successive splittings into the variety we see today.

Context

The Way gives rise to one, then two, then three, then the 'ten thousand things'. Commentators usually take One as undivided primal qi, Two as yin and yang, and Three as their harmonising interaction.

Greek

At the first, Chaos

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth …”

H. G. Evelyn-White (1914), Hesiod, Theogony 116–117 · theoi.com ↗

Hesiod's cosmos has a first moment when something 'came to be' out of an opening; modern cosmology likewise starts its story with the sudden expansion of space itself.

Context

Hesiod (c. 700 BCE) says that first of all Chaos came into being. The word means a yawning gap, not disorder. Earth (Gaia), dim Tartarus beneath her, and Eros, the power that draws things together, follow.

Egyptian

Rising out of Nu

“I am he who came into being in the form of the god Khepera ... I myself raised them up from out of Nu, from a state of helpless inertness. I found no place whereon I could stand.”

E. A. Wallis Budge (1912), Legends of the Gods, 'The History of Creation—A' (Papyrus Bremner-Rhind) · sacred-texts.com ↗

A single self-generated source from which everything else unfolds sits next to the idea of the universe expanding from one hot, dense state.

Context

In the Heliopolitan tradition the creator (Atum, here as Khepri, 'he who comes into being') rises out of Nu, the dark, inert primordial water, and has nowhere to stand until the first mound appears. At Memphis a rival theology said Ptah created by conceiving things in his heart and speaking them with his tongue.

Greek (Orphic)

Night's egg

A comic chorus in Aristophanes (414 BCE) retells an Orphic-style creation: Night lays an egg in dark Erebus, and a shining winged being of love hatches from it. In Orphic poems proper this first-born is Phanes, 'the one who brings to light'.

Paraphrase · gutenberg.org ↗

The cosmic egg is a widespread image of everything held in one small, closed seed before it opens: a poetic counterpart to the compact early universe.

Norse

Where fire meets ice

“when the breath of heat met the rime, so that it melted and dripped, life was quickened from the yeast-drops, by the power of that which sent the heat, and became a man's form. And that man is named Ymir”

Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916), The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning ch. V · sacred-texts.com ↗

Life from the meeting of hot and cold at one point: a mythic image of a first spark, set beside the hot, dense beginning of the universe.

Context

Snorri sets icy Niflheim in the north and fiery Muspellheim in the south, with the gap between them. Where hot winds meet the frost, the melting drops come alive as Ymir, the first being.

K'iche' Maya

A word, and land appears

“He called out "earth," and the solid land appeared.”

Lewis Spence (1908), The Popol Vuh, 'The First Book' · gutenberg.org ↗

A whole world starting from a single spoken word echoes the theme of everything beginning from one small, concentrated origin.

Context

In the Popol Vuh the gods take counsel, and the world comes into being through speech: they name the earth and it rises from the water. The gods then set out to make beings who can speak and keep the days.

Hawaiian

When the heavens turned and changed

“At the time that turned the heat of the earth,
At the time when the heavens turned and changed,
At the time when the light of the sun was subdued
To cause light to break forth,”

Liliʻuokalani (1897), An Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition (The Kumulipo), 'The First Era', lines 1–4 · sacred-texts.com ↗

An opening of heat, upheaval and held-back light echoes the hot, rapidly changing first moments after the Big Bang.

Context

The Kumulipo, a genealogical chant of the Hawaiian royal line, opens with a time of heat and turning, as the heavens change and light is held back until it can break forth. Queen Liliʻuokalani translated it while imprisoned after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Zulu

Out of the bed of reeds

“All things as well as Unkulunkulu sprang from a bed of reeds,—every thing, both animals and corn, every thing, coming into being with Unkulunkulu.”

Henry Callaway (1868), The Religious System of the Amazulu, ‘Unkulunkulu’, p. 41 (dictated by an unnamed Zulu informant) · sacred-texts.com ↗

Everything coming out together from one source echoes the scientific beginning, when all matter and energy came from a single hot, dense state.

Context

Zulu speakers told Callaway that Unkulunkulu, the 'old-old one', broke off from uthlanga, a bed of reeds, and that people, animals and crops all came forth with him. Callaway's informants gave differing accounts, and scholars debate how far missionary ideas shaped the idea of Unkulunkulu as 'creator'.

IIIt ≈ 10⁻¹¹ s to ~20 minutes

First matter

Matter wins; first nuclei form

As the universe cooled, forces that had acted as one split apart; by about a hundred-billionth of a second, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force had become distinct. Matter and antimatter were made and destroyed in almost equal amounts, but for roughly every billion particles that annihilated with antiparticles, one extra particle of matter survived, and everything in today's universe is built from that leftover. Within a few millionths of a second, quarks were bound into protons and neutrons. From about one second to a few minutes, the whole universe was a fusion reactor, forging deuterium and helium until expansion cooled it too much to continue, leaving about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium by mass with a trace of lithium. These predictions match observed hydrogen, helium and deuterium closely; only lithium is off, by about a factor of three, the unsolved 'cosmic lithium problem'.

How we know

The least-processed gas in the cosmos, seen in distant quasar spectra and pristine dwarf galaxies, contains the deuterium and helium that Big Bang nucleosynthesis predicts. The matter density these abundances imply independently agrees with the value read from the cosmic microwave background.

  • Surviving matter: about 1 particle per billion (CERN)
  • Baryons per photon today: η ≈ 6.1 × 10⁻¹⁰ (PDG 2024, CMB + BBN)
  • Quarks bind into protons and neutrons: a few millionths of a second after the start (CERN)
  • Neutron-to-proton ratio when fusion began: about 1 to 7 (PDG)
  • Primordial helium: 24.5 ± 0.3% of ordinary matter by mass (Yp = 0.245, PDG)

LatestMarch 2025: CERN's LHCb experiment reported the first observation of matter-antimatter asymmetry (CP violation) in baryons, the particle family that includes protons and neutrons (a 2.45% asymmetry in Λb decays, 5.2σ; published in Nature in 2025). Known sources of asymmetry are still far too small to explain why matter won, so the mystery remains open.

Sources: CERN: The matter-antimatter asymmetry problem · CERN: The early universe · Particle Data Group (2024): Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis review (Fields, Molaro & Sarkar) · CERN EP Newsletter: First observation of CP violation in baryons (LHCb)

Shared thread

Pulling apart

Creation by division is one of the most widely shared ideas on Earth. Shu lifts the sky-goddess Nut from Geb, Tāne pushes Rangi from Papa, a firmament divides the waters, an egg breaks into silver and gold. In physics the first minutes are also a story of things becoming distinct: forces, then particles, then the first atomic nuclei.

In the traditions

Hebrew Bible

Waters above, waters below

“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”

King James Version (1611; standard 1769 text), Genesis 1:6 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

Genesis builds order through a series of separations, much as the cooling young universe divided: the fundamental forces parted and matter condensed out of a single hot state.

Context

On the second day God sets a raqia ('firmament', literally a beaten-out expanse) between the waters above and below. Genesis 1 creates largely by dividing: light from darkness, day from night, waters from waters, sea from land. Scholars of the ancient Near East usually read the raqia as a solid sky-dome; others take it as sky or atmosphere.

Islam

Joined, then rent asunder

“the heavens and the earth were both solid, and we burst them asunder; and we made from water every living thing”

E. H. Palmer (tr.), The Qur'an (1880), Sura 21:30 · sacred-texts.com ↗

An original unity split open echoes the early universe, where forces and particles that began in one hot state became distinct as it expanded and cooled.

Context

The heavens and earth were ratq (closed up or fused) and God made them fatq (split apart). Classical exegetes recorded two main readings: that they were one mass later separated (Saʿid ibn Jubayr, al-Hasan, Qatada, followed by Ibn Kathir), or that the sky gave no rain and the earth no plants until God 'opened' them (Ibn ʿAbbas). Many modern readers connect the verse to the Big Bang; others see that as reading science into the text.

Hindu (Upanishads)

Silver Earth, Golden Sky

“The egg lay for the time of a year. The egg broke open. The two halves were one of silver, the other of gold.”

F. Max Müller (1879), The Upanishads Part I (SBE 1), Chāndogya III.19.1 · sacred-texts.com ↗

In the first seconds and minutes, one undifferentiated state split into distinct forces and kinds of matter; the breaking egg is an ancient image of that kind of parting.

Context

What did not exist becomes existent, grows, and turns into an egg. When it splits, the silver half becomes the earth and the golden half the sky, and the sun is born from it. The Laws of Manu tell a parallel story in which Brahmā divides the egg by thought into heaven and earth.

Hindu (Shaiva)

Shiva's Dance at CERN

“In the night of Brahma, Nature is inert, and cannot dance till Shiva wills it: He rises from His rapture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound”

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1918), The Dance of Shiva (essay first published 1912) · archive.org ↗

CERN's colliders recreate conditions like those of the earliest instants, when particles were continually created and annihilated; Fritjof Capra used Shiva's dance as a metaphor for that ceaseless activity.

Context

The Naṭarāja image shows Shiva dancing within a ring of fire: the drum stands for the sound of creation, the flame for dissolution. On 18 June 2004 India gave CERN a 2-metre Naṭarāja to mark its association with the laboratory. The statue is a gift and a metaphor, not a scientific claim.

Japanese (Nihon Shoki)

Clear Rises, Heavy Settles

“The purer and clearer part was thinly drawn out, and formed Heaven, while the heavier and grosser element settled down and became Earth.”

W. G. Aston (1896), Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan, Book I · sacred-texts.com ↗

In the first moments, matter and forces 'settled out' of one hot mixture as the universe cooled; the Nihon Shoki pictures heaven and earth sorting themselves out of one mass.

Context

The Nihon Shoki (720 CE) opens with heaven and earth not yet separated and yin and yang not yet divided, 'a chaotic mass like an egg'. Then the clear part rises as heaven and the heavy part settles as earth, closely adapting the Chinese Huainanzi.

Egyptian

Shu lifts the sky

“O my son Shu, I pray thee to set thyself under [my] daughter Nut ... Take thou the goddess upon thy head, and act thou as nurse for her …”

E. A. Wallis Budge (1912), Legends of the Gods, 'The Legend of the Destruction of Mankind' (Book of the Heavenly Cow) · sacred-texts.com ↗

Heaven and earth pushed apart so that space opens between them parallels the first minutes, when forces and kinds of matter went their separate ways.

Context

Ra withdraws to the sky on the back of Nut, and the stars come into being on her body. When she trembles at the height, Ra tells Shu, god of air, to hold her up. It echoes the classic Egyptian image of Shu standing between Geb (earth) and the arched sky-goddess Nut, keeping them apart.

Roman

Strife ended by separation

“But God, or kindly Nature, ended strife—he cut the land from skies, the sea from land, the heavens ethereal from material air;”

Brookes More (1922), Ovid, Metamorphoses I.21–23 · theoi.com ↗

A warring mixture sorting itself into distinct layers echoes the early universe, where forces and particles 'froze out' into separate kinds as it cooled.

Context

Ovid (8 CE) opens with Chaos, a shapeless mass in which hot fought cold and wet fought dry. A god, or 'kindly Nature', ends the conflict by sorting the mix into land, sea, air and fiery upper ether.

Finnish

The egg's two halves

“From one half the egg, the lower,
Grows the nether vault of Terra:
From the upper half remaining,
Grows the upper vault of Heaven;”

John Martin Crawford (1888), The Kalevala, Rune I · sacred-texts.com ↗

One whole splitting into above and below matches the separation of the first moments, when one undivided state broke into distinct parts.

Context

A duck nests on the knee of the sky-maiden Ilmatar as she floats on the sea. When the eggs fall and break, the lower half of the shell becomes the earth and the upper half the vault of the sky.

Cherokee

An island hung from the sky vault

“The earth is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock.”

James Mooney (1900), Myths of the Cherokee, story 1 'How the World Was Made', p. 239 · sacred-texts.com ↗

A world sorted into distinct layers, sky above and earth below, mirrors the early universe settling into separate forces and kinds of matter.

Context

In this Cherokee account, everything was once water. The animals lived crowded together above the sky arch until the Water-beetle brought up mud that spread into the earth. The finished world has separate layers: a floating island, the stone sky vault above, and the cords joining them.

Māori

Tāne pushes sky from earth

“Lo, he pauses; his head is now firmly planted on his mother the earth, his feet he raises up and rests against his father the skies, he strains his back and limbs with mighty effort.”

Sir George Grey (1855), Polynesian Mythology, 'The Children of Heaven and Earth' · sacred-texts.com ↗

Sky and earth pried apart from a single embrace is a vivid image for the early universe splitting into distinct forces and particles.

Context

Ranginui (Sky) and Papatūānuku (Earth) lie locked in an embrace, and their children live cramped in darkness between them. After the others fail, Tāne-mahuta sets his head on the earth and his feet against the sky and forces them apart. In some versions he uses a post instead.

Yoruba

Sky and earth, two calabashes

“Obatala and Odudua, or Heaven and Earth, resemble, say the priests, two large cut-calabashes, which, when once shut, can never be opened.”

A. B. Ellis (1894), The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa, ch. II 'Chief Gods' · sacred-texts.com ↗

Sky and earth as two halves of one vessel echoes the early universe dividing into distinct parts out of a single unified whole.

Context

According to the priests Ellis consulted, the Yoruba pictured sky and earth as two halves of a cut calabash: the upper bowl is the arched sky, the lower the earth, meeting at the horizon. Temples symbolized this with two whitened calabashes, one covering the other. Ellis's colonial-era account should be read alongside Yoruba scholarship.

IVt ≈ 380,000 years

First light

The universe becomes transparent

For its first few hundred thousand years the universe was a glowing fog: light could travel only a short way before bouncing off a free electron. Around 380,000 years, the cooling gas reached about 3,000 K, about as hot as the filament of an old-fashioned light bulb, and electrons settled onto hydrogen and helium nuclei to form the first neutral atoms. With almost nothing left to scatter it, light suddenly streamed freely across space, and that same light still reaches us from every direction as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), now stretched and cooled by expansion to 2.725 K. Etched into it are temperature differences of only about 1 part in 100,000, the imprint of slightly denser and thinner regions that gravity would later build into galaxies, including our own.

How we know

The CMB has been mapped in ever finer detail by COBE, WMAP, Planck and ground telescopes such as ACT and SPT. COBE showed its spectrum is a near-perfect blackbody at 2.725 K, exactly what light released from a hot, dense, uniform early universe should look like after cosmic expansion.

  • Released about 380,000 years after the Big Bang (ESA)
  • Temperature then: about 3,000 K; now: 2.72548 ± 0.00057 K
  • Stretched about 1,100-fold by cosmic expansion since then (redshift z ≈ 1,100)
  • Temperature ripples: about 1 part in 100,000
  • ACT (2025): CMB maps with about 5× Planck's resolution, covering over 40% of the sky

LatestMarch 2025: the Atacama Cosmology Telescope released its final (DR6) maps, the most sensitive high-resolution CMB maps to date, with the faint polarization of this ancient light directly visible. They confirmed the universe's age of 13.8 billion years to about 0.1% and agreed with Planck.

Sources: ESA: Planck and the cosmic microwave background · Fixsen (2009), 'The Temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background', ApJ 707, 916 · NASA GSFC: COBE science results (blackbody spectrum; 1-in-100,000 anisotropy) · CITA / University of Toronto: Astronomers snap clearest 'baby picture' yet of the universe (ACT, March 2025)

Shared thread

Light before the stars

Genesis puts light on the first day and the Sun on the fourth, an order readers puzzled over for centuries. The oldest light we can see, the cosmic microwave background, really does predate every star, by more than a hundred million years. The parallel is one of sequence, not of mechanism.

In the traditions

Hebrew Bible

Let there be light

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

King James Version (1611; standard 1769 text), Genesis 1:3–4 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

Genesis has light before any star, and the universe’s first light (now seen as the cosmic microwave background) likewise streamed free roughly 100 to 200 million years before the first stars ignited.

Context

Light is spoken into being on the first day, before the sun, moon and stars appear on the fourth, a sequence commentators have long puzzled over. One rabbinic tradition (Hagigah 12a) speaks of a primordial light that God set aside for the righteous.

Christianity

Light the darkness could not hold

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

King James Version (1611; standard 1769 text), John 1:1, 1:5 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

Light that darkness could not hold resonates with the moment, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the cooling cosmos released light that had been trapped in a dense fog of plasma.

Context

John's Gospel opens by echoing Genesis 1:1. It presents the divine Word (Logos), whom Christians identify with Christ, as the one through whom all things were made and as a light shining in darkness. The Greek katelaben ('comprehended') can mean grasped, understood or overcame.

Hindu (Rig Veda)

Dawn, Fairest of Lights

“This light is come, amid all lights the fairest; born is the brilliant, far-extending brightness.”

Ralph T. H. Griffith (1896), The Hymns of the Rig Veda, 1.113.1 · sacred-texts.com ↗

About 380,000 years after the Big Bang the universe became transparent and its first light streamed out across space; that light still reaches us as the cosmic microwave background.

Context

The Vedic goddess Uṣas, Dawn, drives back Night, throws off the veil of darkness, and wakes the living. This is a hymn to the daily dawn, not a creation account, but it is one of the Veda's most vivid celebrations of light breaking free of darkness.

Greek

Night gives birth to Day

“From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus.”

H. G. Evelyn-White (1914), Hesiod, Theogony 123–125 · theoi.com ↗

Brightness emerging from an earlier murk is a poetic counterpart to the moment the cosmic fog cleared and the first light could travel freely.

Context

Hesiod's first beings include Erebus (primal darkness) and Night. From their union come Aether, the bright upper air, and Day. Light is born out of darkness.

Finnish

Sunshine from the yolk

“From the white part come the moonbeams,
From the yellow part the sunshine,
From the motley part the starlight,”

John Martin Crawford (1888), The Kalevala, Rune I · sacred-texts.com ↗

Light breaking out of a closed shell is a poetic counterpart to the moment the early universe became transparent and its first light streamed free.

Context

The insides of the broken egg become the lights of heaven: the white becomes the moon, the yolk the sun, the speckled parts the stars.

Inca (Quechua)

Viracocha lights the dark world

“They say that it was dark, and that there he made the sun, moon, and stars, and that he ordered the sun, moon, and stars to go to the island of Titicaca”

Cristóbal de Molina (c. 1575), 'The Fables and Rites of the Yncas', trans. Clements R. Markham (1873), Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas, p. 5 · sacred-texts.com ↗

A dark world suddenly opened to light parallels the moment, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when light first streamed freely through the universe.

Context

Andean accounts recorded by the Spanish priest Molina say that after a flood the Creator (Viracocha) found the world dark. At Tiahuanaco he made the sun, moon and stars and sent them up into the sky from the island in Lake Titicaca. The account reached us through a colonial cleric, and Andean versions vary.

Māori

Te Ao Mārama, world of light

“It was the fierce thrusting of Tane which tore the heaven from the earth, so that they were rent apart, and darkness was made manifest, and so was the light.”

Sir George Grey (1855), Polynesian Mythology, 'The Children of Heaven and Earth' · sacred-texts.com ↗

Light flooding a space that had been sealed and dark parallels the moment the young universe turned transparent and its first light streamed free.

Context

Once Rangi and Papa are parted, light floods into the space between them: Te Ao Mārama, the world of light. Te Ara notes that the dawn sunrise in the pōwhiri (welcome ceremony) is understood as recalling this creation of the world of light.

Zulu

A torch so you may see

“He looked on the sun when it was finished, and said, "There is a torch which will give you light, that you may see."”

Henry Callaway (1868), The Religious System of the Amazulu, ‘Unkulunkulu’, p. 41 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Light given 'that you may see' resonates with the moment the universe became transparent and light could finally travel freely.

Context

In the same informant’s account, Unkulunkulu finishes the sun and presents it to people as a torch, so that the world can at last be seen.

V380,000 to ~100+ million years

The Dark Ages

Darkness, and a hidden web

After the CMB was released the universe went dark: its leftover glow slid into the infrared, and there were no stars yet. It was still a busy era. Dark matter, about 85% of all matter, invisible and untouched by light, kept pooling into the denser regions seeded at the beginning, and gravity pulled it into a vast cosmic web of sheets, filaments and knotted halos. Ordinary hydrogen and helium gas, no longer held smooth by the pressure of light once atoms formed, fell into these dark-matter halos and slowly gathered at their centers. In principle this gas can be detected through hydrogen's faint 21-centimeter radio line, but the signal is so faint and so stretched by expansion that nobody has yet seen it.

How we know

No direct observation yet. The picture comes from the CMB, which fixes the starting ripples and the amount of dark matter, combined with large computer simulations. Radio experiments such as HERA, EDGES and SARAS are hunting the 21-cm signal; the cleanest dark-ages signal, below about 40 MHz, can only be measured from space or the far side of the Moon.

  • Dark matter: about 84-85% of all matter (Planck 2018: Ωc h² = 0.120 vs Ωb h² = 0.0224)
  • Duration: from about 380,000 years to roughly 100-200 million years
  • CMB temperature falls from about 3,000 K to about 60 K by redshift ~20
  • Hydrogen 21-cm line: 1,420 MHz at rest; dark-ages signal stretched below about 40 MHz
  • First star-forming 'minihalos': about 1 million solar masses, collapsing at redshift ~20-30 (about 100-180 million years)

LatestFebruary 2022: the SARAS 3 radio telescope (India) reported in Nature Astronomy that it found no sign of the unexpectedly deep 21-cm absorption claimed by EDGES in 2018, rejecting that signal profile with 95.3% confidence. The 21-cm signal from the end of the dark ages and cosmic dawn remains undetected.

Sources: NASA Science: Dark Matter · Singh et al. (2022), 'On the detection of a cosmic dawn signal in the radio background', Nature Astronomy 6 (SARAS 3) · CU Boulder NESS: Understanding Cosmic Dawn (21-cm frequencies and observing bands) · Bromm (2013), 'Formation of the First Stars' (minihalo masses and collapse redshifts)

Shared thread

The long night

Many traditions describe a long darkness before the lights: the counted nights of Te Pō, darkness on the face of the deep, Ilmatar adrift for seven hundred years. Astronomers call the matching era the Dark Ages, and it was not idle: unseen matter was gathering the whole time.

In the traditions

Hebrew Bible

Darkness upon the deep

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

King James Version (1611; standard 1769 text), Genesis 1:2 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

Darkness brooding over the deep while it waits for the next word parallels the cosmic Dark Ages, a long era of cooling gas before any star gave light.

Context

Before the first creative word the earth is tohu va-vohu ('without form and void'), darkness covers the tehom (the deep), and God's spirit or wind hovers over the waters; Rashi likens it to a dove hovering over its nest. Readers differ over whether this describes a chaos that already existed or the first stage of creation.

Sikh

Countless Ages of Darkness

In Mārū Solhe (Guru Granth Sahib, ang 1035), Guru Nanak describes uncounted ages of dense darkness before creation: no earth or sky, no day or night, no sun or moon, no scriptures, only the infinite Hukam, the divine Order, with the Creator absorbed in the primal void. Creation unfolds when the Creator wills it. (Paraphrased.)

Paraphrase · igurbani.com ↗

During the cosmic Dark Ages there were no stars yet, but gravity was already gathering matter: a darkness that was still governed by order.

Egyptian (Hermopolitan)

Kek and Kauket, the darkness

Priests at Hermopolis described the state before creation as eight primordial beings in four pairs: the waters (Nu and Naunet), boundlessness (Heh and Hauhet), darkness (Kek and Kauket) and hiddenness (Amun and Amaunet). Darkness is one of the named ingredients of the world before the first sunrise.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

A long, formless darkness that already holds the potential for later light resembles the cosmic Dark Ages, when gas filled the universe but no stars yet shone.

Finnish

Seven hundred years of waiting

“Seven hundred years she wandered,
Ages nine of man's existence,”

John Martin Crawford (1888), The Kalevala, Rune I · sacred-texts.com ↗

A long, dark stretch of waiting before anything new can be born echoes the cosmic Dark Ages, which lasted millions of years before the first stars.

Context

Ilmatar, the 'Daughter of the Ether', comes down to the endless sea. Wind and wave make her pregnant, but she drifts for centuries, unable to give birth, before creation can go on.

Māori

Te Pō, the long nights

“'There was darkness from the first division of time, unto the tenth, to the hundredth, to the thousandth', that is, for a vast space of time; and these divisions of times were considered as beings, and were each termed 'a Po'”

Sir George Grey (1855), Polynesian Mythology, 'The Children of Heaven and Earth' · sacred-texts.com ↗

Ages of darkness in which things are quietly forming echo the cosmic Dark Ages, when matter gathered unseen before the first stars lit.

Context

Māori ritual chants count out the ages of Te Pō, the night: the tenth, the hundredth, the thousandth darkness. Each age is treated as a being in its own right. Life multiplied in this darkness even though light had never yet broken.

VI~100-250 million years; reionization done by ~1 billion years

Cosmic dawn

The first stars ignite

Inside the densest dark-matter clumps, gas finally grew dense enough to collapse and ignite the first stars, perhaps 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang. These 'Population III' stars, made only of hydrogen and helium, are thought to have been giants, typically tens to hundreds of times the Sun's mass, blazing at surface temperatures near 100,000 K and burning out within a few million years, seeding space with the first heavier elements as they died. None has ever been directly observed. Their ultraviolet light, and that of the first galaxies, began splitting hydrogen atoms apart again, carving bubbles of clear, ionized gas that grew and merged until the intergalactic hydrogen 'fog' was gone by about a billion years. The James Webb Space Telescope now sees galaxies from this era; the record holder, MoM-z14, shines from just 280 million years after the Big Bang.

How we know

JWST spectroscopy confirms galaxies as early as about 280 million years after the Big Bang (MoM-z14, z = 14.44). Quasar spectra show reionization finished by z ≈ 5.3 (about 1.1 billion years), and Planck's CMB data place its midpoint near 700 million years. Population III stars remain predictions of theory and simulations.

  • Most distant confirmed galaxy: MoM-z14, redshift 14.44 ± 0.02, about 280 million years after the Big Bang
  • First stars: about 100-250 million years after the Big Bang (models)
  • Population III stars (theory): ~100 solar masses typical, surfaces ~100,000 K, lifetimes of a few million years
  • Reionization: about half done by ~700 million years; complete by z ≈ 5.3 (~1.1 billion years)
  • Bright early galaxies are about 100× more common than pre-JWST predictions (ESA/Webb)

LatestCurrent distance record: MoM-z14, a galaxy at redshift z = 14.44 ± 0.02, seen about 280 million years after the Big Bang. It was found and confirmed with JWST's NIRCam and NIRSpec in the 'Mirage or Miracle' survey led by Rohan Naidu (MIT). The preprint appeared on 16 May 2025, and the NASA release (28 January 2026) and the peer-reviewed paper (Open Journal of Astrophysics, 30 January 2026) followed. It remains the record as of October 2026. The galaxy is surprisingly bright, unusually rich in nitrogen, and appears to be clearing the hydrogen fog around itself.

Sources: NASA: Webb pushes boundaries of observable universe closer to Big Bang (MoM-z14, 28 Jan 2026) · Naidu et al., 'A Cosmic Miracle: A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at z_spec = 14.44 Confirmed with JWST' (arXiv 2505.11263; OJAp 2026) · ESA: Cosmic reionisation (Planck timing of reionisation) · Bosman et al. (2022), 'Hydrogen reionisation ends by z = 5.3', MNRAS

Shared thread

Sparks set in the sky

Stars are often made from something thrown or kindled: embers from Muspelheim fixed in the void, roots flung upward by a San girl of the early race, stars set alight by the Diné Black God. In Job the morning stars sing. The first real stars were blue-white giants that burned out within a few million years.

In the traditions

Hebrew Bible

When the morning stars sang

“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

King James Version (1611; standard 1769 text), Job 38:4, 38:7 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

The image of the first stars greeting creation with song finds an echo in cosmic dawn, when the first generation of stars blazed into a dark universe.

Context

Speaking from the whirlwind, God asks Job where he was when the earth's foundations were laid, while the morning stars sang and the 'sons of God' (often read as angels) shouted for joy. The poem treats the stars as living, rejoicing witnesses of creation. Later in the speech (38:31–33) God asks who can bind the Pleiades or loose Orion's bands.

Buddhist

Beings of Streaming Radiance

“beings have mostly been reborn in the World of Radiance; and there they dwell, made of mind, feeding on rapture, self-luminous, traversing the air”

T. W. & C. A. F. Rhys Davids (1921), Dialogues of the Buddha, Part III, Aggañña Suttanta §10 · buddhadust.net ↗

The first stars were the first things to shine by their own light in a dark universe; the sutta's radiant beings, glowing before any sun or moon, are a mythic counterpart.

Context

When the world contracts, beings pass to the Ābhassara realm of 'streaming radiance'. When it expands again they return glowing with their own light into a dark world of water with no sun, moon or stars. Many scholars read the sutta partly as satire of Brahmin origin claims; others treat it as cosmology.

Korean (shamanic)

Stars from a Surplus Sun

In Korea's oldest recorded creation song (the Changsega, recorded in 1923), the creator Mireuk separates heaven and earth and lifts the sky like a pot lid. The sky had two suns and two moons; Mireuk destroys one of each and makes the stars from their remains. The song exists in many variants.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

The first stars ignited out of the material of the early universe; in the Korean song the starry sky is itself made from light-bearing bodies.

Roman

The hidden stars begin to gleam

“all the stars, which long were pressed and hidden in the mass, began to gleam out from the plains of heaven”

Brookes More (1922), Ovid, Metamorphoses I.70–71 · theoi.com ↗

Stars long 'hidden in the mass' that then switch on is a striking image beside the first stars igniting out of dark clouds of gas.

Context

Once the god has separated and ordered the elements, the stars that had been buried in the dark mass of Chaos begin to shine across the sky.

Norse

Sparks set in the sky

“Then they took the glowing embers and sparks that burst forth and had been cast out of Múspellheim, and set them in the midst of the Yawning Void, in the heaven, both above and below, to illumine heaven and earth.”

Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916), The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning ch. VIII · sacred-texts.com ↗

Stars as sparks of fire set burning in the dark is a vivid image beside the ignition of the first stars.

Context

The gods gather sparks and embers thrown out of the fire-realm Muspellheim and fix them in the sky as lights; some are given fixed places and others wandering courses.

Diné (Navajo)

Black God sets the stars

In Diné tradition, Black God (Haashch'ééshzhiní), the fire god, carefully placed the first star patterns, beginning with the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia. Some tellings say he lit each star with fire and carried the Pleiades (Dilyéhé) on his temple. Other versions give the placing to First Man and First Woman. These stories are traditionally told only in winter.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

Diné tradition keeps star stories for the winter months.

A fire-bringer kindling the first lights in a dark sky echoes the cosmic dawn, when the first stars ignited.

Māori

Tāne fetches the stars

“Tane procured the stars, and now dim light was seen. He next brought the moon, and light became stronger.”

Elsdon Best (1922), The Astronomical Knowledge of the Maori, Dominion Museum Monograph No. 3, 'The Distribution and Fixing of the Heavenly Bodies' · knowledge-basket.co.nz ↗

Stars arriving first and making the darkness faintly glow parallels the cosmic dawn, when the first stars lit up a dark universe.

Context

In a Bay of Plenty version recorded by Best, the world was still dark after the separation. Tāne brought the stars first, then the moon, and finally set the sun on high. Other tribal versions credit the ‘family of light’ (Te Whānau Mārama) to other ancestors.

San (|xam)

Roots thrown up become stars

“The girl thought that she would throw up (into the air) roots of the !huing, in order that the !huing roots should become Stars; therefore, the Stars are red;”

W. H. I. Bleek & L. C. Lloyd (1911), Specimens of Bushman Folklore, 'The Girl of the Early Race, Who Made Stars' · sacred-texts.com ↗

Scattered sparks becoming stars, with attention to their different colours, suits the first stars igniting. Astronomers also sort stars by colour.

Context

A girl of the early race, angry at being given too few edible !huing roots, throws them into the sky, where they become stars. In the |xam telling, old (red) roots became red stars and young (white) roots became white stars.

VII~13.5–12.5 billion years ago

Seeds of the Milky Way

A chaotic infant galaxy ignites

Gas flowing along cosmic filaments into a dark-matter halo lit the first generations of Milky Way stars. This early 'Aurora' phase was messy. Stars were born on jumbled, tilted orbits with little overall spin, and their chemistry varied wildly from star to star. The oldest survivors still crowd the galaxy's center as a compact, metal-poor 'poor old heart' holding at least 50 million Suns' worth of stars. Within about 1–2 billion years the young galaxy spun up into a disk, and a thick disk was already forming stars about 13 billion years ago, only ~800 million years after the Big Bang.

How we know

Gaia distances combined with LAMOST spectra let astronomers date ~250,000 subgiant stars to within a few percent, while Gaia XP and APOGEE spectra pick out which stars are chemically primitive. The very oldest individual stars are also dated with radioactive 'clocks' such as uranium and thorium.

  • Thick-disk star formation began ~13 billion years ago, ~0.8 billion years after the Big Bang (Xiang & Rix 2022, ~250,000 subgiants)
  • Poor old heart: at least ~5 × 10^7 solar masses of metal-poor stars, concentrated within a Gaussian radius of ~2.7 kpc; predates the ~12.5-billion-year-old disk (Rix et al. 2022)
  • Aurora stars have [Fe/H] ≲ −1.3; the galaxy 'spun up' into a disk between [Fe/H] ≈ −1.3 and −0.9 over ~1–2 billion years (Belokurov & Kravtsov 2022)
  • Minimum proto-Galaxy stellar mass inside 10 kpc: (9.1 ± 0.2) × 10^8 solar masses (Horta & Schiavon 2025)
  • Star HE 1523-0901 dated to 13.2 billion years by uranium/thorium decay (ESO 2007)

LatestMarch 2024: Malhan & Rix (ApJ) identified 'Shakti' and 'Shiva', two candidate proto-galactic fragments in the inner Milky Way thought to have merged 12–13 billion years ago. They are presented as 'presumed', and could instead be field stars trapped by the bar.

Sources: ESA – Gaia finds parts of the Milky Way much older than expected (Xiang & Rix 2022, Nature) · Rix et al. 2022 – The Poor Old Heart of the Milky Way (arXiv) · Belokurov & Kravtsov 2022 – From dawn till disc (MNRAS; arXiv) · ESO – HE 1523-0901 dated to 13.2 billion years (eso0723)

Shared thread

Order from scattered material

Several traditions describe creation as gathering and shaping material that already exists: Plato’s craftsman bringing order out of disorder, the Qur’an’s heaven that “was but smoke,” the Kojiki’s land drifting like floating oil, the Vishnu Purana’s elements combining into one mass. For the young Milky Way, gravity did the gathering.

In the traditions

Islam

When heaven was smoke

“Then He made for the heaven and it was but smoke, and He said to it and to the earth, 'Come, ye two, whether ye will or no!' They said, 'We come willingly!'”

E. H. Palmer (tr.), The Qur'an (1880), Sura 41:11 · sacred-texts.com ↗

A heaven formed from a diffuse, smoke-like state that gathers at a summons parallels the clouds of gas and dark matter that came together to build the proto-Milky Way.

Context

God turns to the heaven while it is dukhan (smoke) and summons heaven and earth, which answer willingly. He then forms seven heavens and adorns the lowest with lamps (41:12). Ibn Kathir explained the smoke as vapour rising from the waters; modern readers often link it to primordial gas and dust.

Hindu (Puranas)

Elements Combine into One Mass

“Having combined, therefore, with one another, they assumed, through their mutual association, the character of one mass of entire unity”

H. H. Wilson (1840), The Vishnu Purana, Book I, Chapter 2 · sacred-texts.com ↗

The proto-Milky Way formed when many separate clumps of gas and dark matter merged under gravity into a single bound system.

Context

In this Purana's account, the cosmic principles could not produce anything while they stayed separate. Only by blending did they form the world-egg, which 'gradually expanded like a bubble of water', with Vishnu dwelling inside it as Brahmā.

Japanese (Shinto, Kojiki)

Like Floating Oil

“a thing that sprouted up like unto a reed-shoot when the earth, young and like unto floating oil, drifted about medusa-like”

Basil Hall Chamberlain (1882), The Kojiki, Section I · sacred-texts.com ↗

The young Milky Way was still loose, drifting gas and dark matter slowly condensing into a single body, much like the Kojiki's half-formed, floating land.

Context

At the beginning the young land had not yet taken shape; it floated like oil and drifted like a jellyfish, and from it a deity sprouted like a reed-shoot. Later the gods are told to 'make, consolidate, and give birth to this drifting land'.

Greek

The craftsman brings order

“Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order”

Benjamin Jowett (1871/1892), Plato, Timaeus 30a · classics.mit.edu ↗

Order assembled out of scattered, turbulent material: in the science the 'organizer' is gravity, drawing clumps of gas and dark matter into the young Milky Way.

Context

In Plato's Timaeus a divine craftsman, the demiurge, does not create from nothing. He takes material already moving in disorder and shapes it into an ordered cosmos. Plato adds that time and the heavens came into being together.

Finnish

Ilmatar shapes the shores

“Where her head was pointed landward,
There appeared wide bays and inlets;”

John Martin Crawford (1888), The Kalevala, Rune I · sacred-texts.com ↗

A world shaped step by step out of formless material matches the young Milky Way taking shape from scattered clumps of gas.

Context

After the egg breaks, Ilmatar swims across the new world and gives it shape: islands rise where her hand turns, the sea deepens where she dives, and bays and shores form along her path.

Hawaiian

The slime that founded earth

“Then began the slime which established the earth,
The source of deepest darkness.”

Liliʻuokalani (1897), The Kumulipo, 'The First Era', lines 6–7 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Formless material slowly thickening into a foundation resembles the clumps of gas and dark matter that gathered to seed the proto-Milky Way.

Context

In the depth of night a primal slime forms the foundation of the earth. From it the Kumulipo traces a long chain of births, from the coral polyp onward to plants, sea creatures and eventually people.

Yoruba

Ọbàtálá shapes land and people

“According to a myth, which is, however, contradicted by another, Obatala made the first man and woman out of clay,”

A. B. Ellis (1894), The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa, ch. II 'Chief Gods' · sacred-texts.com ↗

A handful of matter spreading and being shaped into land and bodies echoes small clumps gathering and building up the proto-galaxy.

Context

In a widely told Yoruba account, Olódùmarè sends Ọbàtálá down a chain from the sky with a snail shell of earth, a hen and a palm nut. The hen scatters the earth over the waters at Ilé-Ifẹ̀ to make dry land, and Ọbàtálá shapes human bodies from clay. Ellis himself noted that the myths contradict one another, and many versions exist.

VIII~12–11 billion years ago

An early collision

A hidden early collision

While the Milky Way was still a young, puffy disk, it swallowed at least one sizable galaxy. Astronomers found traces of it in two independent ways. One was a family of old globular clusters with matching ages and orbits, nicknamed 'Kraken'. The other was a chemically distinct population of stars buried in the inner galaxy, called 'Heracles' after the Greek hero tied to the myth of the Milky Way's creation. In August 2026 a Hubble–Gaia study argued these are one event: a dwarf galaxy named Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles (LKH), carrying about 500 million Suns' worth of stars and absorbed roughly 12 billion years ago. Its debris sank into the galaxy's core, where it is very hard to tell apart from the Milky Way's own ancient stars, so its size and timing are still debated.

How we know

Hubble measures precise ages and metal content for globular clusters, and Gaia supplies their orbits; together they reveal groups of clusters that formed in another galaxy. APOGEE's infrared spectra see through dust to find inner-galaxy stars whose chemistry and motions differ from the Milky Way's own.

  • Kraken: accreted ~10.9 (+0.4/−0.7) billion years ago, stellar mass ~1.9 × 10^8 solar masses, 13 globular clusters (Kruijssen et al. 2020)
  • Heracles: progenitor stellar mass ~5 × 10^8 solar masses (about twice the paper's estimate for Gaia-Enceladus), located within ~4 kpc of the center (Horta et al. 2021)
  • LKH: ~1.8 billion years before Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus; ~5 × 10^8 solar masses of stars, mostly deposited inside 6 kpc; 12 of 39 studied clusters (Massari et al. 2026)
  • At the time of Kraken the Milky Way was about 4 times less massive than today (2020 press release)
  • Heracles debris is said to make up roughly one-third of the stellar halo's mass (SDSS press release, 2020)

LatestAugust 2026: Massari et al. (Nature Astronomy), with an ESA/Hubble release, report a massive accretion event 1.8 billion years before Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus and name the progenitor Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles (LKH), uniting the Kraken and Heracles detections.

Sources: Kruijssen et al. 2020 – Kraken reveals itself (MNRAS; arXiv PDF) · SDSS – Astronomers discover new 'fossil galaxy' (Heracles) buried in the Milky Way · ESA – Hubble and Gaia solve our galaxy's merger mystery (Aug 2026) · Massari et al. 2026 – Evidence of a massive accretion event 1.8 billion years before GSE (Nature Astronomy)

Shared thread

A battle before order

Marduk fights Tiamat, Indra slays Vṛtra, the Psalms recall the breaking of Leviathan, and the Æsir and Vanir go to war before merging into one family. The Milky Way’s own history includes a collision it barely remembers: a dwarf galaxy swallowed about 12 billion years ago, whose stars now hide in the galaxy’s core.

In the traditions

Hebrew Bible

Breaking the dragon's heads

“Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces”

King James Version (1611; standard 1769 text), Psalm 74:13–14 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

Chaos subdued before order is set up echoes the violent mergers of the young Milky Way, which gave way to a calmer era in which the galaxy's lasting structure formed.

Context

Several biblical poems praise God for subduing the sea and its monsters: Leviathan, the 'dragons', and Rahab (rendered 'the proud' in the KJV of Job 26:12). The surrounding verses go on to the ordering of day, night, sun and seasons. Scholars compare this language with Near Eastern combat myths such as the Enuma Elish (the 'Chaoskampf' motif). Traditional readers often apply it to the parting of the Red Sea, and Genesis 1 itself describes creation without any battle.

Hindu (Rig Veda)

Indra Slays the Dragon

“He slew the Dragon, then disclosed the waters, and cleft the channels of the mountain torrents.”

Ralph T. H. Griffith (1896), The Hymns of the Rig Veda, 1.32.1 · sacred-texts.com ↗

The young Milky Way went through violent early collisions; the hymn's battle that ends in released, flowing order is a mythic counterpart to that turbulent assembly.

Context

Armed with the thunderbolt, Indra kills the serpent Vṛtra, who had enclosed the waters, and the freed waters rush down to the ocean. It is the Veda's best-known battle myth, read variously as a monsoon myth or as cosmic order defeating chaos.

Chinese (Huainanzi)

Gonggong Breaks the Sky-Pillar

Fighting Zhuanxu for rule, the enraged Gonggong butts Mount Buzhou. The pillar of heaven snaps, so the sky tilts northwest (which is why the sun, moon and stars drift that way) and the earth sinks southeast (where the rivers run). Another Huainanzi chapter tells how Nüwa patched the sky with five-coloured stones.

Paraphrase · zh.wikisource.org ↗

The early Milky Way was shaken by violent collisions before it settled down; the myth likewise moves from cosmic damage to repair and a lasting tilt.

Babylonian

Marduk against Tiamat

“The lord spread out his net and caught her,
And the evil wind that was behind (him) he let loose in her face. ... He seized the spear and burst her belly,”

L. W. King (1902), The Seven Tablets of Creation, Tablet IV, lines 95–96, 101 · sacred-texts.com ↗

A violent clash between two great powers that remakes the world is a mythic parallel to the early, destructive merger that reshaped the young Milky Way.

Context

The young god Marduk becomes champion of the gods and fights Tiamat, the primordial sea. He catches her in a net, drives the winds into her mouth, and kills her with a spear. Hesiod's war between Zeus and the Titans is the Greek counterpart.

Norse

The first war in the world

“On the host his spear did Othin hurl,
Then in the world did war first come;
The wall that girdled the gods was broken,”

Henry Adams Bellows (1923), The Poetic Edda, Voluspo 23 · sacred-texts.com ↗

A primordial conflict that ends with two groups combined into one parallels the violent early merger that became part of the Milky Way.

Context

The seeress remembers the first war, between the Æsir and the Vanir. Odin throws his spear over the enemy host and the gods' fortress wall is broken. The two families of gods later make peace and merge.

Mexica (Aztec)

Huitzilopochtli at Serpent Mountain

“He shattered Coyolxauhqui with a flash of serpentine lightning, and then gave chase to the Centzonuitznaua, whom he pursued four times round the mountain.”

Lewis Spence (1913), The Myths of Mexico and Peru, ch. II 'Mexican Mythology' (retelling Sahagún) · sacred-texts.com ↗

A violent clash that reshapes the heavens is a fitting image for the early merger that shook the young Milky Way.

Context

At Coatepec, Huitzilopochtli is born fully armed and defeats his sister Coyolxauhqui and his four hundred brothers, the Centzon Huitznahua. Many modern scholars read this as the sun overcoming the moon and the southern stars each dawn, but that astral reading is an interpretation, not part of the recorded text.

Māori

Tāwhirimātea's war of storms

“Then, also, there arose in the breast of Tawhiri-ma-tea, the god and father of winds and storms, a fierce desire to wage war with his brothers, because they had rent apart their common parents.”

Sir George Grey (1855), Polynesian Mythology, 'The Children of Heaven and Earth' · sacred-texts.com ↗

A family torn by violent upheaval right after creation suits the violent early merger that disrupted the young galaxy.

Context

Tāwhirimātea, god of winds, opposed the separation and attacked his brothers with hurricanes. He snapped Tāne's forests and drove Tangaroa's children into the sea. Only Tūmatauenga stood firm, and the conflict still echoes in storms.

Yoruba

Ọbàtálá and Odùduwà's rivalry

In some Yoruba versions, Ọbàtálá becomes drunk on palm wine on his way to create the land, and his younger brother Odùduwà takes the bag of earth and completes the task. The result is a lasting rivalry. A contest between the two figures is re-enacted at an annual festival in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, and versions differ widely.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

A struggle over who will shape the world is a fitting human-scale image for the turbulent early encounters that built our galaxy.

IX~10 billion years ago (8–11)

Gaia-Enceladus

Gaia-Enceladus: the great collision

About 10 billion years ago a dwarf galaxy plunged into the Milky Way on a nearly head-on, radial orbit. The discoverers estimated it at about a quarter of the Milky Way's mass at the time, though some later estimates make it smaller. Tides tore it apart and flung its stars onto long, narrow orbits that swing in and out through the galaxy's center. Those stars now make up much of the inner stellar halo. The impact also shook and heated the young disk, puffing up the thick disk and setting off a burst of star formation in it. Amina Helmi's team named it Gaia-Enceladus after the giant Enceladus, child of Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (Sky), who in myth lies buried under Mount Etna and causes earthquakes. Working independently, Vasily Belokurov's team called it the 'Gaia Sausage' for the stretched shape its stars make in a velocity plot.

How we know

Gaia's second data release (2018), cross-matched with APOGEE and SDSS spectra, revealed a large, chemically uniform group of halo stars on highly elongated, slightly retrograde orbits. In velocity space this group appears as the stretched 'sausage'.

  • Mass ratio ~4:1 (Milky Way : Gaia-Enceladus), progenitor stellar mass ~6 × 10^8 solar masses (Helmi et al. 2018)
  • Total (dark + stellar) mass above 10^10 solar masses; accreted 8–11 billion years ago (Belokurov et al. 2018)
  • Later, purer kinematic samples give a stellar mass of ~1.45 × 10^8 solar masses, implying a ~1:8 minor merger (Lane et al. 2023)
  • 13 globular clusters linked to Gaia-Enceladus (Helmi et al. 2018)
  • Its debris stars are extremely radially biased: anisotropy β ≈ 0.9 for halo stars with [Fe/H] > −1.7 (Belokurov et al. 2018)

Latest2023: Lane et al. (arXiv June 2023) measured a lower GS/E stellar mass (~1.45 × 10^8 solar masses), suggesting a ~1:8 minor merger rather than ~1:4. In June 2026 Helmi and Belokurov, the merger's two independent discoverers, shared the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics with Rodrigo Ibata.

Sources: Helmi et al. 2018 – The merger that led to the formation of the Milky Way's inner stellar halo and thick disk (Nature; ar5iv) · Belokurov et al. 2018 – Co-formation of the Galactic disc and the stellar halo (MNRAS; arXiv) · Simons Foundation – The Gaia Sausage: the major collision that changed the Milky Way · Lane et al. 2023 – The stellar mass of the Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus accretion remnant (arXiv)

Shared thread

A world made from a body

Tiamat’s body becomes the sky, Ymir’s the earth, Puruṣa’s the sun and moon, Pangu’s the rivers and stars, Tlaltecuhtli’s the land. The Milky Way really did grow from another galaxy’s body, and one of the two teams that found it named it after a giant of Greek myth.

In the traditions

Latter-day Saint

Element organized, never destroyed

“Element had an existence from the time he had. The pure principles of element, are principles that can never be destroyed. They may be organized and re-organized; but not destroyed.”

Joseph Smith, discourse of 7 April 1844 (King Follett sermon), as published in Times and Seasons (1844) · josephsmithpapers.org ↗

A world made by reorganizing material that already existed resonates with the Milky Way's growth: the stars and gas of a swallowed galaxy, Gaia-Enceladus, were rearranged into our own.

Context

Joseph Smith taught that the word translated 'create' means 'to organize', as one organizes a ship, and that God formed the world from pre-existing 'chaotic matter'. Latter-day Saint scripture says the Gods 'organized and formed the heavens and the earth' (Abraham 4:1) using existing 'materials' (Abraham 3:24), and that 'the elements are eternal' (D&C 93:33). This creation ex materia differs from the ex nihilo view of most other Abrahamic theology, and the 1844 sermon survives in several reports with varying wording.

Hindu (Rig Veda)

The Cosmos from Purusha's Body

“The Moon was gendered from his mind, and from his eye the Sun had birth;”

Ralph T. H. Griffith (1896), The Hymns of the Rig Veda, 10.90.13 · sacred-texts.com ↗

The Milky Way grew in part by absorbing the body of another galaxy, Gaia-Enceladus, whose stars now fill our halo; a world built from a body has a real astronomical counterpart.

Context

The gods sacrifice the cosmic Person, Puruṣa, and the world comes from his body: the moon from his mind, the sun from his eye, the sky from his head, the earth from his feet. The hymn also contains the earliest mention of the four varṇas, a verse much debated today.

Chinese (Pangu myth)

Pangu Becomes the World

Heaven and earth were a chaos like a hen's egg with Pangu inside. After 18,000 years it split: clear yang became heaven and murky yin became earth, and Pangu grew as he held them apart. As he died, his breath became wind, his eyes the sun and moon, his blood the rivers, and his hair and beard the stars. The myth is first attested in the 3rd century CE.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

Our galaxy was partly built from the body of another, Gaia-Enceladus, whose shredded stars now orbit through the Milky Way: a real case of a world made from a body.

Babylonian

A sky made from Tiamat

“He split her up like a flat fish into two halves;
One half of her he stablished as a covering for heaven.”

L. W. King (1902), The Seven Tablets of Creation, Tablet IV, lines 137–138 · sacred-texts.com ↗

The world made from the body of a defeated rival: the Milky Way grew by absorbing the stars and gas of the dwarf galaxy Gaia-Enceladus.

Context

After his victory Marduk splits Tiamat's body in two. One half becomes the vault of heaven, barred so that her waters cannot escape, and the rest is built into the ordered world.

Greek

Gaia's son beneath the island

“But Earth, vexed on account of the Titans, brought forth the giants, whom she had by Sky. ... Enceladus fled, but Athena threw on him in his flight the island of Sicily”

J. G. Frazer (1921), Apollodorus, The Library 1.6.1–2 · theoi.com ↗

The name is a deliberate modern nod to myth: a giant buried inside an island is an apt picture of a whole galaxy whose stars now lie hidden within the Milky Way's halo.

Context

Gaia (Earth), angry that Zeus imprisoned the Titans, bears the Giants to Ouranos (Sky). As Enceladus flees, Athena throws Sicily on top of him; later poets placed him under Mount Etna. Amina Helmi and colleagues, one of two teams that identified the merged dwarf galaxy in 2018, named it Gaia-Enceladus after this Giant born of Gaia and Uranus; the name also echoes ESA’s Gaia satellite, whose data revealed it.

Norse

The world from Ymir's body

“made of him the earth: of his blood the sea and the waters; the land was made of his flesh, and the crags of his bones ... They took his skull also, and made of it the heaven”

Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916), The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning ch. VIII · sacred-texts.com ↗

Like Tiamat's, this is a world made from a slain body: a striking counterpart to a galaxy that grew by taking in another galaxy's stars.

Context

Odin and his brothers kill the giant Ymir and build the world from his body: earth from flesh, sea from blood, rocks from bones, the sky from his skull, clouds from his brain.

Mexica (Aztec)

Earth and sky from Tlaltecuhtli

In one Mexica account, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, as serpents, seize the sea creature Tlaltecuhtli and tear her in two. Her upper half becomes the sky and her lower half the earth. Her hair becomes trees and herbs, her eyes springs and wells, her shoulders mountains. Other sources tell her origin differently.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

A world built from another being's body echoes how the Milky Way grew by absorbing a whole galaxy (Gaia-Enceladus), whose stars now live inside ours.

X~10–8 billion years ago onward

The disk settles

The disk settles; bar and arms

After the last big merger the Milky Way calmed down. Gas settled into a thin, cold, rotating disk where most of today's stars, including the Sun, were born, and the thick disk ran out of gas and stopped forming stars about 8 billion years ago. The inner disk buckled into a rotating bar about 10 kpc end to end, whose middle puffs up into a peanut-shaped bulge. Most estimates put the bar's birth at about 8–10 billion years ago, though some studies argue it is younger. Spiral arms wrap outward from the bar. They are not fixed objects but waves of crowded stars and gas that stars drift through. Rotation speed stays nearly flat at ~230 km/s across most of the disk, so inner stars complete their orbits much faster than outer ones, and this differential rotation keeps winding and reshaping the arms.

How we know

Stellar ages from Gaia combined with APOGEE and LAMOST chemistry show when the thin disk and bar formed. Infrared surveys (Spitzer GLIMPSE, VVV) see through dust to map the bar and bulge, and long-period Mira variables in the nuclear disk serve as clocks for the bar's age.

  • Bar (and nuclear stellar disc) formed ~8 ± 1 billion years ago (Sanders et al. 2024); 8–10 billion years ago (Haywood et al. 2024)
  • Bar half-length 5.0 ± 0.2 kpc (Wegg et al. 2015); bulge/bar angle ~27 ± 2° to the Sun–center line (Wegg & Gerhard 2013)
  • Bar pattern speed ~33 km/s/kpc, corotation at ~7 kpc (Clarke & Gerhard 2022)
  • Thin-disk scale height ~300 pc vs thick disk ~900 pc (Jurić et al. 2008)
  • Rotation curve: 229 km/s at the Sun, declining gently (−1.7 km/s/kpc) from 5 to 25 kpc (Eilers et al. 2019)

LatestJuly 2024: Nepal et al. (A&A, Gaia-RVS ages for ~200,000 stars) found many very old stars, many of them older than 13 billion years, on thin-disk orbits, suggesting the thin disk began forming less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, 4–5 billion years earlier than previously thought.

Sources: Sanders et al. 2024 – The epoch of the Milky Way's bar formation (MNRAS; UCL repository) · Haywood et al. 2024 – Timing the Milky Way bar formation (arXiv) · Nepal et al. 2024 – The oldest thin disc of the Milky Way using Gaia-RVS (arXiv) · Eilers et al. 2019 – The circular velocity curve of the Milky Way from 5 to 25 kpc (arXiv)

Shared thread

Turning and ordering

Once the battles end, many accounts turn to order: Marduk fixes the stars in their stations, the Norse gods name the hours, Vishnu’s tortoise holds the churning mountain, Izanagi and Izanami stir the brine. The galaxy settled too, into a thin spinning disk with a central bar and spiral arms.

In the traditions

Islam

Each floating in its sky

“He it is who created the night and the day, and the sun and the moon, each floating in a sky.”

E. H. Palmer (tr.), The Qur'an (1880), Sura 21:33 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Each heavenly body gliding in its own ordered course echoes the settled Milky Way disk, where hundreds of billions of stars circle the galactic center in orderly orbits.

Context

The Qur'an describes the sun, moon, night and day each moving in its own falak (orbit, sphere or circuit) and 'swimming' (yasbahun) there. Sura 36:40 adds that the sun may not overtake the moon, nor the night outstrip the day. Medieval Muslim astronomers often read falak as Ptolemaic celestial spheres; modern readers tend to think of orbits.

Latter-day Saint

Kolob and the governing ones

“These are the governing ones; and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me … according to its times and seasons in the revolutions thereof”

Pearl of Great Price, Book of Abraham (first published 1842), Abraham 3:3–4 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

A cosmos ranked around a governing center and measured in vast revolutions resonates with a galaxy whose stars all turn around a central hub; the Sun takes about 230 million years for one circuit.

Context

Abraham sees great stars near God's throne. The greatest, Kolob, is set to govern the bodies of its 'order', and its revolutions measure divine time (one day equals a thousand years). Latter-day Saints read Kolob variously, as a literal star, a symbol of Christ, or a picture of a hierarchy in the heavens, and the Church has not identified it with any known astronomical object.

Hindu (Puranas)

Churning the Ocean of Milk

“Hari himself, in the form of a tortoise, served as a pivot for the mountain, as it was whirled around.”

H. H. Wilson (1840), The Vishnu Purana, Book I, Chapter 9 · sacred-texts.com ↗

The Milky Way's disk and central bar rotate around the galactic centre and stir gas into spiral arms where new stars form: a churning around a pivot.

Context

Gods and asuras use Mount Mandara as a churning stick and the serpent Vāsuki as the rope to churn the ocean of milk for amṛta, while Vishnu as a tortoise holds up the spinning mountain. Treasures rise from the ocean, including 'the cool-rayed moon'. The texts do not identify this Ocean of Milk with the Milky Way.

Japanese (Shinto, Kojiki)

Stirring the Brine

“So the two Deities, standing upon the Floating Bridge of Heaven, pushed down the jewelled spear and stirred with it”

Basil Hall Chamberlain (1882), The Kojiki, Section III · sacred-texts.com ↗

Rotation shaped the Milky Way's spinning disk; in this myth, too, stirring and turning bring order out of fluid chaos.

Context

Izanagi and Izanami stand on the Floating Bridge of Heaven and stir the sea with a jewelled spear. Brine dripping from its tip piles up into Onogoro, the first island: a creation by stirring.

Babylonian

Stations for the stars

“...made the stations for the great gods;
The stars, their images, as the stars of the Zodiac, he fixed. ... The Moon-god he caused to shine forth, the night he entrusted to him.”

L. W. King (1902), The Seven Tablets of Creation, Tablet V, lines 1–2, 12 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Chaos gives way to steady, repeating cycles, matching a galaxy settling into an ordered, rotating disk: a kosmos in the Greek sense of 'good order'.

Context

With the sky built from Tiamat, Marduk gives the heavens a regular order: he sets the stars in fixed stations as the zodiac, divides the year into months, and gives the Moon charge of the night.

Norse

Stars learn their stations

“The stars knew not where their stations were. ... Names then gave they to noon and twilight,
Morning they named, and the waning moon,
Night and evening, the years to number.”

Henry Adams Bellows (1923), The Poetic Edda, Voluspo 5–6 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Wandering lights become regular cycles, as the galaxy settled from a chaotic youth into an orderly, rotating disk.

Context

At first sun, moon and stars do not know their places. The gods meet in council and name the parts of the day and the phases of the moon, so that the years can be counted.

Classic Maya

The World Tree turns overnight

Maya scholars have argued that the Classic Maya saw the Milky Way as the raised World Tree (Wakah Chan) standing south to north. As the night and the year turn, it seems to tip over into a crocodile and then a canoe carrying the gods. The authors note there is 'continuing debate' over the details.

Paraphrase · mesoweb.org ↗

A sky band that keeps changing its stance as the heavens rotate parallels the Milky Way's spinning disk, which carries the Sun around once every ~230 million years.

Euahlayi (Aboriginal Australian)

The rainmaker turns with the sky

“There is one old man up there who was once a great rainmaker, and when you see that he has turned round as the position of the Milky Way is altered, you may expect rain; he never moves except to make it.”

K. Langloh Parker (1905), The Euahlayi Tribe, ch. XI 'Something About Stars and Legends' · sacred-texts.com ↗

Reading meaning from how the Milky Way swings around the sky echoes, as a theme, the steady rotation of our galaxy's disk.

Context

Euahlayi knowledge, recorded by the settler Katie Langloh Parker in north-western New South Wales, watches how the Milky Way's position changes through the seasons. A figure within it turning around signals coming rain. Today Euahlayi and Kamilaroi knowledge holders share their sky knowledge on their own terms.

San (|xam)

The Milky Way goes round

“The Milky Way must go round with the stars; while the Milky Way feels that, the Milky Way lies going round; while the stars sail along;”

W. H. I. Bleek & L. C. Lloyd (1911), Specimens of Bushman Folklore, 'The Girl of the Early Race, Who Made Stars' · sacred-texts.com ↗

The stars sailing round with the Milky Way are a poetic match for the galaxy's disk, which rotates and carries the Sun on its own long orbit.

Context

In the |xam account, the Milky Way travels around the sky with the stars through the night. The stars 'sail along' following their own footprints until they turn back toward dawn.

XI4.567 billion years ago

The Sun is born

A star is born, farther in

4.567 billion years ago a cloud of gas collapsed to form the Sun. The gas had already been enriched with heavy elements forged and scattered by earlier generations of stars. The Sun was likely born alongside many sibling stars in a cluster that has long since dispersed, and meteorites keep traces of short-lived radioactive isotopes that point to a nearby massive star. It was probably not born where it is now: recent studies place its birthplace about 3 kpc (~10,000 light-years) closer to the galactic center, from where the bar and spiral arms carried it outward. Gaia also found bursts of star formation near the Sun's neighborhood 5.7, 1.9 and 1.0 billion years ago that line up with passages of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. Whether Sagittarius helped trigger the Sun's own birth is an intriguing but unproven idea.

How we know

The Sun's age comes from lead–lead dating of calcium-aluminium-rich inclusions (CAIs), the oldest solids in meteorites. Its birthplace is inferred by comparing its age and metal content with the galaxy's past chemical gradient, and from the age distribution of thousands of Gaia 'solar twins'.

  • Solar System 'time zero' from CAIs: 4567.30 ± 0.16 million years (Connelly et al. 2012); a 2023 re-analysis gives 4568.42 ± 0.24 million years (Desch et al.)
  • Birth radius ~4.5 ± 0.4 kpc (Lu et al. 2024; ~5 kpc adopted by Baba et al. 2024); older estimate 7.3 ± 0.6 kpc (Minchev et al. 2018). Today ~8.3 kpc
  • Migrated at least ~3 kpc outward (Tsujimoto et al. 2026, 6,594 Gaia solar twins)
  • One galactic orbit ('galactic year') takes ~230 million years (NASA), so ~20 laps since birth if the orbit had stayed the same, likely more
  • Local star-formation bursts ~5.7, 1.9 and 1.0 billion years ago, matching Sagittarius passages (Ruiz-Lara et al. 2020)

LatestMarch 2026: Tsujimoto, Taniguchi et al. (A&A; arXiv 2603.11155) found an excess of 4–6-billion-year-old solar twins near the Sun. They take this as evidence that the Sun and many inner-disk stars migrated outward at least ~3 kpc, possibly linked to the bar's formation.

Sources: ESA – Galactic crash may have triggered Solar System formation (Ruiz-Lara et al. 2020) · Tsujimoto et al. 2026 – Solar twins in Gaia DR3 GSP-Spec II (arXiv) · Desch et al. 2023 – Statistical Chronometry of Meteorites I: Pb-Pb age of t=0 (arXiv) · NASA – Sun facts (galactic orbit ~230 million years)

Shared thread

The Sun’s own birth

Many traditions give the Sun a birth of its own, often a late one: Sūrya drawn out of the sea, Amaterasu washed from Izanagi’s eye, a sleeping man thrown into the sky by San children. Science agrees that the Sun is a latecomer, made from gas already used by earlier generations of stars.

In the traditions

Hebrew Bible

Two great lights, the stars also

“And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.”

King James Version (1611; standard 1769 text), Genesis 1:16 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

Genesis gives the sun and moon their own later moment within a larger creation. Science likewise finds the Sun a latecomer, born 4.6 billion years ago from gas already enriched by earlier generations of stars.

Context

On the fourth day God makes lights in the firmament to mark signs, seasons, days and years. The sun and moon are pointedly left unnamed, which many scholars read as a quiet refusal to treat them as gods, as neighboring cultures did, and the stars are added almost in passing.

Hindu (Rig Veda)

Sūrya Drawn from the Sea

“When, O ye Gods, like Yatis, ye caused all existing things to grow, Then ye brought Sūrya forward who was lying hidden in the sea.”

Ralph T. H. Griffith (1896), The Hymns of the Rig Veda, 10.72.7 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Our Sun formed late, about 4.6 billion years ago, from a cloud of gas and dust already enriched by earlier generations of stars: a newcomer drawn out of an older cosmos.

Context

This hymn on the birth of the gods says existence sprang from non-existence. The gods, dancing, raise 'a thickening cloud of dust', and only after all things have begun to grow is the Sun brought out from where it lay hidden in the sea.

Japanese (Shinto, Kojiki)

Amaterasu Is Born

“The name of the Deity that was born as he thereupon washed his left august eye was the Heaven-Shining-Great-August-Deity.”

Basil Hall Chamberlain (1882), The Kojiki, Section X · sacred-texts.com ↗

The Sun was born late, from gas already reworked by earlier stars; in the Kojiki the sun likewise appears only after a long chain of earlier births.

Context

Returning from the land of the dead, Izanagi purifies himself in water. The sun goddess Amaterasu is born from his left eye and the moon deity Tsukuyomi from his right, followed by the storm god Susanoo.

Greek

Helios in his chariot

“As he rides in his chariot, he shines upon men and deathless gods”

H. G. Evelyn-White (1914), Homeric Hymn 31, To Helios · theoi.com ↗

To the Greeks the Sun had its own birth and parentage; science also gives our Sun a birth, 4.6 billion years ago, from a cloud in the galactic disk.

Context

The Homeric Hymn praises Helios, the Sun, child of the Titans Hyperion and Euryphaessa, whose horses carry him across the sky each day and down to Ocean at evening.

Egyptian

Nut swallows and bears the Sun

In Egyptian cosmological texts the sky-goddess Nut arches over the earth, swallows the Sun as it sets, carries it through her body at night, and gives birth to it again at dawn. Astrophysicist Or Graur (2024) suggests the Milky Way may have marked Nut's outstretched arms in winter and her backbone in summer, presented as a proposal since no Egyptian text clearly names the Milky Way.

Paraphrase · arxiv.org ↗

A sun born again and again from the body of the sky is a poetic parallel to the Sun forming inside the Milky Way from gas enriched by earlier stars.

Norse

Sun pursued by the wolf

“they caused Sun to drive those horses that drew the chariot of the sun ... he that runs after her is called Skoll; she fears him, and he shall take her.”

Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916), The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning chs. XI–XII · sacred-texts.com ↗

The Sun is born at a set moment and fated to end, much as science gives our Sun a birth and a finite lifetime.

Context

The gods set Sól (Sun) and her brother Máni (Moon) to drive the chariots of the sun and moon. Sól hurries across the sky because the wolf Sköll chases her, and one day he will catch her.

K'iche' Maya

Ascent to become sun and moon

“who now mounted to heaven and became the sun and moon, whilst the four hundred youths slain by Zipacna became the stars.”

Lewis Spence (1908), The Popol Vuh, end of 'The Second Book' · gutenberg.org ↗

The Sun and its neighbours rising out of an older, darker story echoes the Sun forming 4.6 billion years ago from material left by earlier generations of stars.

Context

After the Hero Twins defeat the lords of the underworld, the honoured dead rise to become the sun and moon, and the four hundred slain youths become stars. In Spence's version the twins' father and uncle rise. Modern K'iche'-based translations (e.g. Tedlock) have the twins themselves become sun and moon and the 400 boys become the Pleiades.

Yolŋu (Aboriginal Australian)

Walu carries her torch

In Yolŋu tradition of Arnhem Land, Walu the Sun-woman lights a small fire at dawn and paints herself with red ochre, coloring the clouds. She carries a stringybark torch across the sky from east to west, then travels back underground to rise again. Similar sun-woman stories are told by other nations, such as the Tiwi.

Paraphrase · arxiv.org ↗

The Sun as a single carried flame parallels the scientific picture of the Sun as one ordinary star lit 4.6 billion years ago.

San (|xam)

Children throw the Sun skyward

“When the Sun was thrown up into the sky it became round, and never was a man afterwards.”

W. H. I. Bleek & L. C. Lloyd (1911), Specimens of Bushman Folklore, 'The Children are Sent to Throw the Sleeping Sun into the Sky' · sacred-texts.com ↗

A light-bearer gathered up and made into a round sun echoes the Sun forming from a collapsing cloud into a glowing sphere 4.6 billion years ago.

Context

The Sun was once a man of the early race whose light shone from his armpit and lit only the area around his home. Children crept up while he slept and threw him into the sky, telling him to become the Sun and warm the whole earth. He became round.

XII~6 billion years ago to today

Streams and spills

Sagittarius and the shredded halo

For roughly the last 6 billion years the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy has been plunging through the Milky Way on a steep, near-polar orbit, with models placing passages about 5–6, 2 and 1 billion years ago. Each pass stripped away more of its stars. They now form the Sagittarius stream, a ribbon of stars that wraps all the way around the galaxy and reaches beyond 100 kpc. Sagittarius itself was discovered in 1994 on the far side of the galactic center. It is now a battered remnant of about 400 million solar masses and may be fully dissolved within about a billion years. It is one of many: astronomers have catalogued about 130 stellar streams from torn-apart dwarf galaxies and globular clusters, and surveys find that nearly the entire stellar halo is made of such wreckage.

How we know

Gaia proper motions combined with spectroscopic surveys (SDSS, H3) trace streams as coherent threads in position, motion and chemistry. RR Lyrae and blue horizontal-branch stars act as standard candles, mapping debris out past 100 kpc.

  • Sagittarius dwarf discovered in 1994 (Ibata, Irwin & Gilmore)
  • Remnant total mass ~4 × 10^8 solar masses, about a quarter of it in stars; likely disrupted within ~1 billion years (Vasiliev & Belokurov 2020)
  • Stream apocentres: leading arm ~48 kpc, trailing arm ~103 kpc (Belokurov et al. 2014); extra ‘spur’ at ~120 kpc from the Sun (Sesar et al. 2017)
  • Over 120 streams reported; 133 known streams cited (Bonaca & Price-Whelan, New Astronomy Reviews)
  • At least 95% of halo giants within 50 kpc belong to identified substructures (Naidu et al. 2020)

LatestJune 2026: the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics went to Rodrigo Ibata (discoverer of the Sagittarius dwarf), Amina Helmi and Vasily Belokurov for 'uncovering the fossil evidence of past mergers proving that the Milky Way galaxy was built through hierarchical accretion'.

Sources: Bonaca & Price-Whelan – Stellar Streams in the Gaia Era (arXiv) · Naidu et al. 2020 – Evidence from the H3 Survey that the stellar halo is entirely comprised of substructure · Vasiliev & Belokurov 2020 – The last breath of the Sagittarius dSph (arXiv) · The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics 2026

Shared thread

Spilled across the sky

The most widespread story about the Milky Way is that it was spilled: Hera’s milk, a dog’s stolen cornmeal, a girl’s wood ashes, Coyote’s careless toss, a heavenly river poured from Vishnu’s foot. Gaia’s maps show the galaxy’s halo really is made of spilled material: long streams of stars torn from smaller galaxies.

In the traditions

Jewish mysticism

Shattered vessels, scattered sparks

In Luria's account, the vessels formed to hold the divine light could not contain it and shattered. Sparks of holiness fell and were scattered through the lower worlds, trapped in 'husks' (kelipot), and human acts of goodness and observance help gather and raise them (tikkun). It is a theological and ethical vision, not a physical cosmology.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

A once-whole order broken and strewn in fragments across creation echoes the stellar streams, remnants of torn-apart dwarf galaxies that now wrap around the Milky Way.

Islam

The seam of the sky

When Ibn al-Kawwaʾ asked about al-Majarra (the Milky Way), ʿAli is reported to have called it the sharaj (the seam or opening) of the sky, from which heaven was opened with pouring water at Noah's flood (Qur'an 54:11). This is a report recorded by Ibn Abi Hatim and cited by Ibn Kathir, not a Qur'anic statement. Classical Arabic dictionaries likewise call the Milky Way the 'seam' or 'gate' of heaven.

Paraphrase · quran.com ↗

The Milky Way pictured as a seam from which a flood poured across the world resonates with the streams of stars spilled from galaxies the Milky Way tore apart.

Hindu (Puranas)

The Ganges of Heaven

“Having her source in the nail of the great toe of Vishńu's left foot, Dhruva receives her”

H. H. Wilson (1840), The Vishnu Purana, Book II, Chapter 8 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Astronomers now trace streams of stars torn from dwarf galaxies arcing across our sky; a heavenly river pouring in from beyond the world is a poetic counterpart.

Context

The celestial Gaṅgā flows from Vishnu's foot, past the pole star and the moon, and falls on Mount Meru before dividing into the earthly rivers. Wilson's footnote identifies this heavenly Ganges with the Milky Way, and in Sanskrit and Hindi the Milky Way is Ākāśagaṅgā, 'Ganges of the sky'.

Chinese (Shijing and folk)

The Silver River

“There is the Milky Way in heaven, Which looks down on us in light;”

James Legge (1879), The Shih King (SBE 3), Minor Odes, 'The Tâ Tung' · sacred-texts.com ↗

The Milky Way's band is laced with streams of stars spilled from torn-apart dwarf galaxies: a river of stars across the sky in a literal sense.

Context

An ode in the Classic of Poetry, over 2,600 years old, already calls the Milky Way 'the Han', the sky's counterpart of the Han River. In later folk versions the Queen Mother of the West draws her hairpin across the sky, a river of stars pours out between the Weaver Girl (Vega) and the Cowherd (Altair), and magpies bridge it once a year on the seventh night of the seventh month.

Greek

Hera's milk across the sky

In the best-known version, the infant Heracles was put to the breast of the sleeping Hera so that her divine milk would make him immortal. When she woke and pushed him away, the milk sprayed across the heavens as the Milky Way. The Greeks called the band galaxias kyklos, 'the milky circle', from gala (milk): the source of our word 'galaxy'.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

The Milky Way's halo is laced with long streams of stars torn out of small galaxies: a modern picture of material 'spilled' in trails around the galaxy.

Welsh (Celtic)

Gwydion's track across heaven

“he travelled through the heavens in search of a lady, who had eloped with Gronwy Befr, and left a track behind him, which has ever since been called Caer Gwydion.”

D. Silvan Evans (1870), 'The Milky Way', Nature 3: 167–168 · nature.com ↗

A trail left by someone crossing the sky is a mythic counterpart to the stellar streams that shredded dwarf galaxies have left looping around the Milky Way.

Context

In Welsh tradition the Milky Way is Caer Gwydion, the “fortress” of Gwydion, the enchanter of the Mabinogion. Welsh poets said he crossed the heavens in search of a woman who had eloped with Gronw Pebr (in the Mabinogi, Blodeuwedd, wife of his nephew Lleu) and left this trail behind.

Cherokee

Where the Dog Ran

“leaving behind a white trail where now we see the Milky Way, which the Cherokee call to this day Gi`lï'-utsûñ'stänûñ'yï, "Where the dog ran."”

James Mooney (1900), Myths of the Cherokee, story 11 'The Milky Way' · sacred-texts.com ↗

A bright trail spilled across the sky matches the long streams of stars torn from dwarf galaxies that now wrap around the Milky Way.

Context

People in the south find their cornmeal disappearing from the mill at night. They catch a dog from the north eating it and whip it away. As it runs howling home, meal spills from its mouth across the sky. Some Cherokee tellings also link the Milky Way to other images.

Diné (Navajo)

Coyote flings the rest

As the stars are carefully set out, impatient Coyote grabs the bag (a bag of mica, or in some versions a buckskin of crystals) and tosses the remaining stars into the sky. That is why so many stars have no names or patterns, and in some tellings it is how the Milky Way formed. The museum’s telling ends: “In this way, Coyote created both chaos and order.” Versions differ on who was placing the stars.

Paraphrase · baskets.nhmu.utah.edu ↗

Diné tradition keeps star stories for the winter months.

Stars scattered in a careless throw resemble the shredded remains of small galaxies strewn across the Milky Way's halo.

Māori (Tūhoe)

Tāne's basket of stars

“he plaited a basket and placed in it the adornments of the house of Tane-te-waiora (the stars), and took them away to adorn the breast of Rangi (the Sky Parent). … The Milky Way itself is that basket.”

Elsdon Best (1922), The Astronomical Knowledge of the Maori, section 'Aotahi' (account attributed to Tutaka of Tūhoe) · knowledge-basket.co.nz ↗

A container of stars hung across the sky offers a poetic counterpart to the band of countless faint stars that is our galaxy seen edge-on.

Context

In a Tūhoe account recorded by Best, Tāne gathers the stars into a woven basket and carries them up to adorn his father Ranginui. The basket itself remains in the sky as the Milky Way. An example in Te Aka Māori Dictionary likewise calls Te Ikaroa (the Milky Way) the basket that held the stars.

Euahlayi (Aboriginal Australian)

Campfires along the sky-river

“The Milky Way is a warrambool, or water overflow; the stars are the fires, and the dusky haze the smoke from them, which spirits of the dead have lit on their journey across the sky.”

K. Langloh Parker (1905), The Euahlayi Tribe, ch. XI 'Something About Stars and Legends' · sacred-texts.com ↗

A haze of countless small fires strung along a sky-river echoes the Milky Way's glow, which is the combined light of billions of distant suns.

Context

For the Euahlayi, the Milky Way is an overflowing watercourse. Its stars are campfires lit by the spirits of the dead, and its haze is their smoke, as they camp and cook mussels along the way. Smoke and campfire readings of the Milky Way also appear among other south-eastern and South Australian nations, with local differences.

San (|xam)

Wood ashes thrown into the sky

“The wood ashes which are here, they must altogether become the Milky Way.”

W. H. I. Bleek & L. C. Lloyd (1911), Specimens of Bushman Folklore, 'The Girl of the Early Race, Who Made Stars' · sacred-texts.com ↗

Ashes flung in a glowing band are a fitting image for the streams of scattered stars from shredded dwarf galaxies that now wrap the Milky Way.

Context

The same girl puts her hands into the wood ashes of the fire and flings them into the sky, telling them to become the Milky Way. It glows gently so that people walking at night can find their way home. The narrator says his mother told him the story.

XIIIToday

The Milky Way today

Our barred spiral home today

Today the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy of roughly 100–400 billion stars. Its bright disk is about 100,000 light-years across, and faint disk stars have been found twice as far out. The Sun sits about 27,000 light-years (8.28 kpc) from the center, just above the midplane, orbiting at roughly 230 km/s. At the center lies Sagittarius A*, a black hole of 4.3 million solar masses that the Event Horizon Telescope first imaged in 2022. All of this is embedded in a dark-matter halo that holds most of the galaxy's mass, probably around a trillion Suns though estimates vary. About 60 known satellite galaxies orbit it, including the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which appear to be on their first approach.

How we know

Gaia DR3 measured positions and motions for 1.8 billion sources. ESO's GRAVITY instrument tracks stars orbiting Sgr A* to weigh it and measure its distance. Radio masers and Gaia stars trace the rotation curve, and the EHT linked radio dishes into an Earth-sized telescope.

  • Stars: ~100–400 billion (ESA Gaia scientist estimate); stellar mass ~6.1 ± 1.1 × 10^10 solar masses (Licquia & Newman 2015)
  • Sun–center distance R0 = 8.277 kpc (~27,000 ly); Sgr A* mass (4.297 ± 0.012) × 10^6 solar masses (GRAVITY 2022)
  • EHT image of Sgr A* released 12 May 2022 (2017 data, 8 observatories)
  • Total mass ~1 × 10^12 solar masses (e.g., virial 9.0 ± 1.3 × 10^11; Vasiliev et al. 2021), but some Gaia rotation-curve analyses give only ~2 × 10^11
  • LMC at 49.59 kpc (Pietrzyński et al. 2019) moving at 321 ± 24 km/s (Kallivayalil et al. 2013); SMC at 62.44 kpc (Graczyk et al. 2020); both likely on first infall

LatestMay 2022: the Event Horizon Telescope revealed the first image of Sagittarius A* (12 May 2022). Coming next: Gaia DR4 and a new Milky Way map of more than two billion stars and other objects are due on 2 December 2026.

Sources: GRAVITY Collaboration 2022 – Mass distribution in the Galactic Center (A&A 657) · ESO – Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy (eso2208) · ESA Gaia mission news (DR4 date, end of mission) · Licquia & Newman 2015 – Milky Way stellar mass and SFR (arXiv)

Shared thread

A river, a road, a spine

Nearly every people named the band of light, and the names fall into a handful of images: milk, a river, a road, scattered straw, a backbone, a creature. Galileo’s telescope settled what it is in 1610, the light of countless stars, which we see edge-on from inside the disk.

In the traditions

Rabbinic Judaism

Camps of countless stars

“Daughter, I have created twelve constellations in the firmament, and for each constellation I have created thirty armies, and for each army thirty legions”

Maurice H. Harris (ed.), Hebraic Literature: Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and Kabbala (1901), ch. XII, citing Berachoth fol. 32, col. 2 (Talmud, Berakhot 32b) · sacred-texts.com ↗

The Talmud's vast but finite count, far beyond the Milky Way's 100–400 billion stars, shares with modern astronomy the sense of a sky with more stars than anyone can imagine.

Context

When Zion complains that God has forgotten her (Isaiah 49:14), God answers by listing the hosts of heaven: 12 constellations, each divided by thirty five times over (armies, legions, divisions, cohorts, camps), and each camp holding 365,000 myriads of stars, all created for her sake. Multiplied out, that is about 1.06 × 10^18 stars, but the passage is about God's care, not a census. Psalm 147:4 likewise says God counts the stars and calls each by name.

Latter-day Saint

Worlds without number

“And worlds without number have I created … The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine.”

Pearl of Great Price, Book of Moses (revelation of 1830), Moses 1:33, 1:37 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

Numberless worlds sit naturally beside today's astronomy, which counts hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone and finds that many, probably most, have planets.

Context

In a vision Moses is shown that God has created worlds 'without number'. Many have passed away and many still stand, innumerable to humans but known to God. Verse 38 adds that as one earth passes away another comes, and that there is 'no end' to God's works.

Baháʼí

Every star with its planets

Baháʼu'lláh (1817–1892) writes that every fixed star has its own planets and every planet its own creatures, more than anyone can count. In the same passage he notes that scholars had fixed the earth's life at several thousand years without considering the number or age of other worlds. The English (Shoghi Effendi's 1935 translation) is paraphrased here.

Paraphrase · bahai.org ↗

Countless stars each attended by worlds of their own resonate with the exoplanet era, which has found planets to be common around the Milky Way's stars.

Buddhist

A Thousand Suns, a Thousand Moons

Asked how far a Buddha's voice can reach (Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.80), the Buddha describes a 'thousandfold' world-system of a thousand suns and moons. A thousand of these make a middling system, and a thousand of those a great system of about a billion worlds. Some modern translators render these as 'galaxy', but that is a modern gloss: each 'world' is closer to a single sun-and-moon system.

Paraphrase · a-buddha-ujja.hu ↗

The Milky Way holds 100–400 billion stars and is one of billions of galaxies; the sutta's nested thousands of worlds express a similar sense of scale stacked on scale.

Sikh

Countless Worlds Above and Below

“There are hundreds of thousands of nether and upper regions. Men have grown weary at last of searching for God's limits”

Max Arthur Macauliffe (1909), The Sikh Religion, Vol. I, Japji, pauri 22 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Each survey of the sky finds more stars and galaxies than the last; the observable universe alone holds countless 'upper regions'.

Context

Guru Nanak says there are countless worlds below and skies above (pātālā pātāl lakh āgāsā āgās). Seekers grow tired of looking for their end, and every scripture can only agree that the Creator has no limit.

Korean and Japanese (folk)

Lovers Across the Silver River

In Korea the Weaver (Jingnyeo) and Herdsman (Gyeonu) are kept apart by the Eunhasu ('silver-river water'); each Chilseok, magpies and crows form a bridge, and rain that night is said to be the lovers' tears. A Goguryeo tomb mural of 408 CE already shows them parting. In Japan, Orihime and Hikoboshi meet across the Amanogawa at Tanabata.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

From inside the disk we see our galaxy edge-on as a glowing river; Vega (about 25 light-years away) and Altair (about 17) are near neighbours set against that distant band.

Greek

The light of many stars

“Anaxagoras, Democritus, and their schools say that the milky way is the light of certain stars.”

E. W. Webster (1923), Aristotle, Meteorologica I.8 · classics.mit.edu ↗

The view Aristotle reports and dismisses is the one that later proved correct.

Context

Aristotle surveys earlier theories of the Milky Way. Some Pythagoreans called it the path of a star that fell from heaven at Phaethon’s downfall, and others a track scorched when the Sun once ran along it; Anaxagoras and Democritus said it was the light of stars. Aristotle rejects these and argues it is a glowing exhalation in the upper air.

Italian (Renaissance astronomy)

Galileo resolves the Galaxy

“the Galaxy is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.”

E. S. Carlos (1880), Galileo, The Sidereal Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius, 1610) · gutenberg.org ↗

The first observational step toward the modern view that we live inside a vast disk of stars and see it edge-on as a band across the sky.

Context

Turning his new telescope on the sky in 1609–10, Galileo found that the Milky Way's glow broke up into countless faint stars, settling an argument going back to the Greeks.

Finnish / Estonian / Baltic

The path of the birds

In Finnish (Linnunrata), Estonian (Linnutee) and Lithuanian (Paukščių Takas) the Milky Way is the ‘birds’ path’. Folk tradition says migrating birds follow it on their seasonal journeys; it is sometimes also the road souls take to the afterworld. Folklorist Yuri Berezkin finds the motif across the eastern Baltic and many Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples.

Paraphrase · folklore.ee ↗

The name treats the galaxy as a guide for living creatures; its shape still serves as a sky landmark for northern people today.

Inca (Quechua)

Mayu, river of dark llamas

Andean peoples call the Milky Way Mayu, 'the river', mirrored on earth by the Vilcanota. Along it they read dark-cloud animals (yana phuyu): Yacana the llama, whose eyes are Alpha and Beta Centauri, with a nursing baby llama, plus a serpent, a fox, a toad and a tinamou. The anthropologist Gary Urton recorded these figures among Quechua communities near Cusco in the 1970s.

Paraphrase · bolivianexpress.org ↗

These figures are drawn in the dark dust clouds, the same cold clouds where astronomers see new stars being born today.

Lakota

The Spirit Road

In Lakota teaching each child receives a wanáǧi (spirit) that comes from a star. At death the spirit rests in the cup of the Big Dipper (Wičhákhiyuhapi), whose stars carry and mourn it, then travels the spirit road of the Milky Way to a fork, where it returns to a star. Teachings vary among Lakota communities and families.

Paraphrase · sdpb.org ↗

The road from star to person and back to star is a poetic parallel to the scientific point that the atoms in our bodies were forged inside earlier stars.

Kamilaroi & Euahlayi (Aboriginal Australian)

Gawarrgay, the Emu in the Sky

Kamilaroi and Euahlayi people see Gawarrgay, an emu traced in the dark dust lanes of the Milky Way, with the Coalsack as its head. Its changing posture through the year tracks real emu behaviour and egg-collecting seasons: in April and May it runs, in June and July it sits on its nest, and by about November it is said to rest in a waterhole. The Boorong of north-west Victoria (recorded by W. E. Stanbridge, 1857) and many other nations have their own emu figures. The study was carried out with Euahlayi leader Michael Anderson as co-author, and it deliberately omits sacred levels of the story.

Paraphrase · arxiv.org ↗

The emu is drawn not in stars but in the dark dust lanes, the cold clouds where new stars are forming in the Milky Way today.

Kaurna (Aboriginal Australian)

Wodliparri and its dark ponds

For the Kaurna of the Adelaide Plains, the Milky Way is Wodliparri, a large river with reeds along its banks. The dark spots in it (Yurakauwe) are large ponds, home of the aquatic being Yura, who punishes those who break sacred law.

Paraphrase · arxiv.org ↗

Reading the dark patches as ponds picks out the same dense dust clouds that astronomers map as dark nebulae and star nurseries.

San (!Kung, Nharo, !Ko), Tswana, Xhosa

The backbone of the night

Several San peoples of the Kalahari call the Milky Way the 'Backbone of the Night'. For the Tswana it is molalatladi, said to hold up the sky and to govern day and night. Xhosa call it umnyele wezulu, likened to bristles raised along an angry dog's back. For the G/wi it is one of the paths along which the god N!adima carries the sun.

Paraphrase · arxiv.org ↗

Seeing the Milky Way as a spine holding up the sky fits what it is: the disk of our own galaxy seen edge-on, the structure everything else hangs on.

Interlude

What the world calls it

42 names for the same band of light, grouped by the picture each one draws.

Milk

The Greek name gave English the word “galaxy.”

  • galaxias kyklosAncient Greekmilky circle
  • Via LacteaLatinmilky road
  • Shvil HaChalavHebrewthe milk path
  • Rāh-e ŠiriPersianmilky way
  • Llwybr LlaethogWelshmilky path
  • Bealach na Bó FinneIrishway of the white cow

River

Across Asia, Australia and the Andes the band is water.

  • ĀkāśagaṅgāSanskrit / HindiGanges of the sky
  • Yínhé 銀河ChineseSilver River
  • Tiānhé 天河ChineseRiver of Heaven
  • Amanogawa 天の川JapaneseRiver of Heaven
  • Eunhasu 은하수Koreansilver-river water
  • Mirinae 미리내Koreandragon stream
  • MayuQuechuathe river
  • warramboolEuahlayioverflow watercourse, river in the sky
  • WodliparriKaurnahut river
  • Nehar di-NurAramaic (Daniel 7:10), Jewish traditionriver of fire

Road

A path for souls, birds, pilgrims or a fleeing hero.

  • Wanáǧi TȟačháŋkuLakotaspirits’ road
  • Xibalba beK’iche’ Mayaroad to Xibalba
  • LinnunrataFinnishbirds’ path
  • LinnuteeEstonianbirds’ way
  • Paukščių TakasLithuanianbirds’ path
  • VetrarbrautOld Norsewinter way
  • VintergatanSwedishwinter street
  • Hacılar YoluOttoman Turkishpilgrims’ road
  • Camino de SantiagoSpanishWay of St James
  • Caer GwydionWelshfortress of Gwydion
  • Gi`lï’-utsûñ’stänûñ’yïCherokeewhere the dog ran

Straw

A trail of straw dropped by a thief or laden animals.

  • Darb al-TabbānaArabicpath of the straw-carriers
  • KahkashānPersianstraw-draggers
  • SamanyoluTurkishstraw road
  • Hardagoghi ChanaparhArmenianstraw thief’s way

Backbone

In southern Africa the band is the spine of the night sky.

  • Backbone of the NightSan (!Kung, Nharo, !Ko)the night sky’s spine
  • umnyele wezuluisiXhosabristles of heaven

Creature and other

Animals, garments, gates and seams.

  • Te IkaroaMāorithe long fish
  • Te MangōroaMāorithe long shark
  • Ka IʻaHawaiianthe fish
  • GawarrgayKamilaroi & Euahlayithe emu, in the dark lanes
  • molalatladiSetswanaresting place of the lightning bird
  • al-MajarraArabicdrag-trail; the seam of heaven
  • CitlālīcuēNahuatlstar skirt
  • YikáísdáháDinéthat which awaits the dawn
  • Swarga DuārīHindustanigate of heaven

Act II

The next 10 billion years

Act I could be read in light that has already reached us. Act II cannot be observed, only calculated. Some of it is close to certain: the Sun will brighten, swell and fade. Some of it is open: whether Andromeda merges with the Milky Way in the next 10 billion years is close to even odds, so from chapter XVI on you can choose which future to follow, and switch at any time.

Choose a future

XIVNow to ~1.5 billion years from now

The brightening Sun

The Sun turns up the heat

The Sun is slowly brightening as helium builds up in its core: about 1% every 110 million years, or roughly 10% over the next billion years. Earth's natural thermostat, the carbonate-silicate cycle, will respond by pulling ever more carbon dioxide out of the air, until within roughly a billion years there may be too little left for most plants to photosynthesise, and the oxygen-rich atmosphere may last only about that long too. Once the thermostat can no longer compensate, water vapour starts reaching the upper atmosphere and escaping to space; estimates of when the oceans begin to go range from at least about 1 billion years (Leconte et al. 2013) to 1.5-2 billion years (Wolf & Toon 2014, 2015). Meanwhile the galaxy keeps tidying up: the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, already being shredded into a stream of stars, will probably be fully disrupted within the next billion years. And the Milky Way itself forms only about 1.5-2 Suns' worth of new stars per year, a 'green valley' galaxy past its star-forming prime.

How we know

Solar models calibrated on the Sun's present brightness, size and internal vibrations (helioseismology), and checked against Sun-like stars of other ages, predict the brightening; climate and geochemistry models then estimate how Earth's air and oceans respond. The galaxy numbers come from Gaia measurements of Sagittarius's stars and from Milky Way-wide star-formation tracers compared with thousands of other galaxies.

  • Sun brightens ~1% every 110 million years, ~10% over the next ~1 billion years; Earth leaves the habitable zone in ~1 billion years in this model (Schröder & Smith 2008, MNRAS)
  • Oceans: runaway-greenhouse threshold ~375 W/m² absorbed sunlight, so Earth 'should not enter a runaway greenhouse state before at least 1 billion years', later than earlier 1-D models implied (Leconte et al. 2013, Nature); habitable for at least ~1.5 billion years (Wolf & Toon 2014); significant water loss only at +19% sunlight (Wolf & Toon 2015)
  • Life support: a C4-plant biosphere lasts at least another 0.9-1.5 billion years (Caldeira & Kasting 1992, Nature); oxygen-rich air lasts 1.08 ± 0.14 billion years (Ozaki & Reinhard 2021, Nature Geoscience)
  • Sagittarius dwarf: ~4 × 10^8 solar masses remain, about a quarter in stars; 'will likely be disrupted over the next Gyr' (Vasiliev & Belokurov 2020, MNRAS)
  • Milky Way star-formation rate: 1.65 ± 0.19 solar masses per year (Licquia & Newman 2015, ApJ); three new methods give 1.42-1.65 (Elia et al. 2025)

Latest2024: Graham, Halevy & Abbot ('Substantial extension of the lifetime of the terrestrial biosphere', arXiv:2409.10714, Planetary Science Journal) argue that weathering feedbacks keep CO2 above starvation levels for longer, extending land-plant survival from ~1 Gyr to ~1.6-1.86 Gyr, with extreme heat rather than CO2 starvation as the eventual 'kill mechanism'.

Sources: Schröder & Smith 2008, Distant future of the Sun and Earth revisited (arXiv:0801.4031) · Leconte et al. 2013, Increased insolation threshold for runaway greenhouse processes on Earth-like planets (arXiv:1312.3337) · Graham, Halevy & Abbot 2024, Substantial extension of the lifetime of the terrestrial biosphere (arXiv:2409.10714) · Vasiliev & Belokurov 2020, The last breath of the Sagittarius dSph (arXiv:2006.02929)

Shared thread

An appointed term

The Qur’an has the sun running on to a place of rest; the Psalms say the heavens will wax old like a garment; a Buddhist treatise counts the extra suns that dry the oceans at a world’s end; an Egyptian legend pictures the sun-god himself grown old. The science agrees that the Sun has a term. It is roughly halfway through its hydrogen-burning life and is slowly brightening.

In the traditions

Judaism and Christianity (Hebrew Bible, Psalms)

Wax old like a garment

“They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.”

King James Version (1611), Psalm 102:26–27 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Like the slowly brightening Sun, the psalm treats even the heavens as aging things with a lifespan, set beside something that does not wear out.

Context

A psalm of lament sets the earth and heavens, which God founded and which will grow old and be changed like worn clothing, against God, whose years have no end. Jewish readers hear it as a prayer of trust in God's permanence (the quoted verses are 27–28 in Hebrew numbering); the Letter to the Hebrews (1:10–12) applies the passage to Christ.

Islam (Qur'an)

The sun runs to its rest

“and the sun runs on to a place of rest for it; that is the ordinance of the mighty, the wise.”

E. H. Palmer (1880), The Qur'ân, Sacred Books of the East vol. 9, Sura XXXVI (Yâ Sîn), verse 38 · sacred-texts.com ↗

The image of the sun running a measured course toward an appointed end sits alongside the astronomical picture of a star with a finite supply of fuel.

Context

Among the signs listed in Sura Yā Sīn, the night is stripped from the day, the sun runs its course and the moon passes through its stations, all by divine ordinance. Commentators debated whether the sun's mustaqarr is a place, a fixed term that ends with the world, or both, and an early variant reading (noted in Palmer's footnote) says the sun has no resting place at all. Compare 13:2, where the sun and moon each run for an appointed term.

Buddhism (Theravāda, Visuddhimagga)

When a fifth sun appears

“After the lapse of another long period, a fifth sun appears, and the mighty ocean gradually dries up, so that not enough water remains to moisten the tip of one's finger.”

Henry Clarke Warren (1896), Buddhism in Translations, § 69 'World-cycles', translating Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga, ch. XIII · sacred-texts.com ↗

A sun whose growing heat dries the oceans in stages parallels the expected loss of Earth's oceans as the real Sun brightens over the next billion years or so.

Context

Buddhaghosa's fifth-century manual describes a world-system ending by fire: after a long drought a second sun appears, then more, until the fifth dries the great ocean and the seventh sets everything ablaze, leaving no ash. The scheme draws on the canonical Discourse on the Seven Suns (Sattasuriya Sutta, AN 7.62 or 7.66 depending on the edition), whose stated purpose is to teach that conditioned things are impermanent, not to forecast events.

Japanese (Buddhist essay, Kamo no Chōmei)

The river never stays the same

Kamo no Chōmei's Hōjōki (1212) opens with a river that never stops flowing yet is never the same water, and with foam that gathers and vanishes on still pools; so too, he says, with people and their houses. He then recounts fire, whirlwind, famine and earthquake in Kyoto to illustrate mujō, impermanence. It is often read against the period's sense of a declining Buddhist age, though the essay itself is personal rather than doctrinal. (Paraphrased; no pre-1929 English wording could be verified.)

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

Chōmei's river, which keeps flowing while its water is always new, echoes a Sun that shines on for ages while slowly changing within.

Egyptian (legend of Ra and Isis)

The sun-god grows old

“The holy one had grown old, he dribbled at the mouth, his spittle fell upon the earth”

E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (The Papyrus of Ani), introduction, 'The Legend of Ra and Isis' (1895) · sacred-texts.com ↗

Like the slowly brightening Sun of the science chapter, the Egyptian sun-god is imagined as a ruler whose long reign carries the marks of time.

Context

In this Egyptian legend Ra, the sun-god who has long ruled gods and people, is pictured as old and frail. Isis shapes a serpent from his fallen spittle and the earth, and its bite forces him to reveal his secret name. Even the sun is imagined as a ruler that ages.

Mexica (Aztec)

The old suns were dead

“The old suns were dead, and the current sun was no more immortal than they.”

Lewis Spence (1913), The Myths of Mexico and Peru, ch. II 'Mexican Mythology' · sacred-texts.com ↗

A present age that will itself pass echoes the Milky Way's future: our Sun will age, and the galaxy may one day merge with Andromeda.

Context

The Mexica described a series of world-ages, or 'suns', each ended by catastrophe. Sources disagree on the order of flood, wind, fire and famine. Many later sources count five suns, while Spence's sources favour four. The present sun was expected to end too, and its renewal was feared or celebrated at the close of each 52-year cycle.

Māori

Māui snares the sun

“Let us now catch the sun in a noose, so that we may compel him to move more slowly”

Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology (1855), 'The Legend of Maui' · sacred-texts.com ↗

The sun's daily course is treated as something with a set measure, a theme that sits beside the slow, steady change in the Sun's output over the next billion years.

Context

Finding the days too short for people to finish their work, Māui and his brothers set a noose of ropes where the sun rises, catch it and beat it so that it travels more slowly across the sky. Grey compiled his text from Māori writers and informants, notably Te Rangikāheke of Te Arawa; versions differ between iwi and across Polynesia.

Maasai

Too bright to look upon

In a Maasai story the Sun (identified with Enkai in this telling) and the Moon, Olapa, were husband and wife. In a quarrel the Moon wounded the Sun, who, to hide his shame, began to shine so brightly that no one can look straight at him; he struck out one of the Moon's eyes in return, which is why the full moon looks marked. Summarized from Naomi Kipury, Oral Literature of the Maasai (1983); versions vary.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

The story explains the Sun's blinding brightness as a change that came over it in time, a theme that sits beside the Sun's slow brightening over the next billion years.

XVIn ~1.3 to 2.4 billion years

The Magellanic collision

The Magellanic Clouds crash in

The Large Magellanic Cloud, the bright smudge in southern skies and the Milky Way's biggest satellite (about 15% of its mass, some 160,000 light-years away), is not orbiting forever: it is falling in. Cautun et al. (2019) found that it most likely merges with our galaxy in about 2.4 billion years, usually on its second close pass. Gas driven to the centre could feed our black hole, Sagittarius A*, which may grow by up to a factor of 8 and could flare as an active galactic nucleus, while the halo of stars around the galaxy becomes about 5 times more massive, filled mostly with former LMC stars and some disc stars flung outward. The Small Magellanic Cloud, already being pulled apart by the LMC, is expected to be swallowed along with it. In the Durham team's words there is 'a small chance that we might not escape unscathed': the collision could knock the Solar System out of the Milky Way and into interstellar space.

How we know

Hubble and Gaia measured how fast the LMC moves across the sky, and its unexpectedly large mass (around 10^11 Suns, mostly dark matter) is inferred from its own satellites, its rotation and its pull on the Milky Way. Cautun et al. combined these with orbit calculations and with look-alike collisions in the EAGLE cosmological simulation to predict the aftermath.

  • Merger in 2.4 (+1.2/-0.8) billion years at 68% confidence; it happens in 93% of Monte Carlo cases, 90% of those on the second pericentre (Cautun et al. 2019, MNRAS)
  • Central black hole 'will increase in mass by up to a factor of 8' (Cautun et al. 2019): from ~4.3 million to as much as ~35 million solar masses (derived)
  • Stellar halo becomes ~5 times more massive, mainly from disrupted LMC stars; post-merger halo median metallicity [Fe/H] = -0.5 (Cautun et al. 2019)
  • An updated orbit study calls the LMC merger certain, with a median of 1.3 billion years (20-kpc threshold) or 1.9 billion years (10-kpc threshold) (Sawala et al. 2025, Nature Astronomy)
  • LMC mass ~1.5 ± 0.5 × 10^11 solar masses vs Milky Way ~1.0 ± 0.2 × 10^12 (Sawala et al. 2025 model inputs)

Latest2025: Nakano, Tachihara & Tamashiro (ApJS) tracked ~7,000 massive stars with Gaia and found stars on opposite sides of the SMC moving in opposite directions, with no sign of rotation: evidence that the LMC may be tearing the SMC apart. The same year Sawala et al. (Nature Astronomy) found the LMC certain to merge with the Milky Way, possibly sooner (median ~1.3-1.9 Gyr) than Cautun et al. estimated.

Sources: Cautun et al. 2019, The aftermath of the Great Collision between our Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud (arXiv:1809.09116) · Sci.News 2019: Large Magellanic Cloud on Collision Course with Milky Way Galaxy (Durham press-release wording) · Nagoya University 2025: Evidence of galactic interaction in the Small Magellanic Cloud · Sawala et al. 2025, No certainty of a Milky Way-Andromeda collision (Nature Astronomy)

Shared thread

Swallowed

Eclipse stories across the world describe a light being swallowed: Rāhu’s severed head in the Mahābhārata, a great frog in the Cherokee sky, the wolf of Ragnarök, Korean fire dogs, the sun “eaten” in an ancient Chinese ode. Galaxies really do swallow one another, and the Large Magellanic Cloud, which Boorong astronomers saw as one of a pair of brolgas, is next.

In the traditions

Hinduism (Mahābhārata)

Rahu swallows sun and moon

“And from that time there is a long-standing quarrel between Rahu's head and Surya and Soma. And to this day it swalloweth Surya and Soma (during solar and lunar eclipses).”

Kisari Mohan Ganguli (1883–96), The Mahabharata, Adi Parva, Astika Parva, Section XIX · sacred-texts.com ↗

A shining body swallowed by a hungry head that cannot hold it echoes a small galaxy drawn in and absorbed, with the central black hole flaring as it feeds.

Context

When gods and demons churn the ocean for the nectar of immortality, the Dānava Rāhu slips in to drink it; the Sun and Moon expose him, and Vishnu's discus severs his head, which, having tasted the nectar, lives on and keeps pursuing them, swallowing them at eclipses. Later Indian astronomers explained eclipses by shadows while keeping Rāhu and Ketu as names for the lunar nodes, so the figure lives on in both myth and calculation.

Chinese (Shijing, Book of Poetry)

An eclipse in the tenth month

“The sun was eclipsed,
A thing of very evil omen.
Before, the moon became small,
And now the sun became small.”

James Legge (1879), The Shih King, Sacred Books of the East vol. 3, Minor Odes of the Kingdom, 'Shih Yüeh Kih Kiâo' (Mao 193), stanza 1 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Light that is 'eaten' and made small in the sky parallels a galaxy whose stars are taken in by a larger neighbor, though the poem reads such signs as moral omens, not physics.

Context

An officer of the late Western Zhou laments eclipses of the moon and the sun as omens of misrule. The Chinese line rendered 'the sun was eclipsed' (日有食之) uses shi, 'to eat', the ordinary early word for an eclipse. The eclipse's date (776 and 735 BCE are both proposed) is debated, as is how literally the poem treats heavenly events as moral warnings.

Korean folk tradition (with Chinese parallel)

Fire dogs of the Dark Land

In Korean folk belief, the king of Gamangnara, a realm of darkness, sends fiery dogs (bulgae) to seize the sun and moon; the sun burns the dog's mouth and the moon freezes it, so each must let go, and eclipses are the marks of their bites. Chinese folklore similarly tells of a heavenly dog (tiangou) that eats the sun or moon, traditionally scared off with noise. These are recorded as folk beliefs whose age is hard to date.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

A hungry creature that bites into a great light but cannot keep it is an apt image for a black hole that flares as it feeds on gas from an incoming galaxy.

Egyptian (Apep and the sun's boat)

Apep against the sun

Egyptian temple ritual texts, including the Book of Overthrowing Apep preserved in the Papyrus of Nesi-Amsu, cast the serpent Apep as the enemy of order who tries to hold the sun-god back in darkness as his boat travels. Priests recited spells so that nothing would stop the sun from rising or dim its light.

Paraphrase · gutenberg.org ↗

The image of a great serpent trying to swallow or hold back the sun shares the chapter's theme of one body being drawn in and consumed by another.

Norse (Snorri's Prose Edda)

The wolf swallows the sun

“Then shall happen what seems great tidings: the Wolf shall swallow the sun; and this shall seem to men a great harm. Then the other wolf shall seize the moon, and he also shall work great ruin;”

Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, Gylfaginning ch. LI, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916) · voluspa.org ↗

A pursuer that finally overtakes and swallows a light in the sky offers an image that parallels the Milky Way's slow capture of its satellite galaxy.

Context

Snorri's account of Ragnarök begins with signs in the sky: the wolf that has chased the sun at last catches and swallows her, another wolf seizes the moon, and the stars vanish, before Surtr's fire burns the world. Sources differ on which wolf it is: Gylfaginning ch. XII names the sun's pursuer Sköll, while Vafþrúðnismál gives the deed to Fenrir.

Cherokee

The frog that swallows the sun

“When the sun or moon is eclipsed it is because a great frog up in the sky is trying to swallow it.”

James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900), 'The Moon and the Thunders' · sacred-texts.com ↗

A sky-being that tries to swallow a light shares the chapter's theme of one body drawn in and consumed by another; in the Cherokee account, the community acts together to bring the light back.

Context

Mooney recorded that Cherokee people explained an eclipse as a great frog in the sky trying to swallow the sun or moon, and that people gathered to fire guns and beat the drum to frighten it away until the light returned. Mooney worked mainly among the Eastern Cherokee in the late 1800s; tellings vary.

Māori

Māui and the woman of night

“if you see me creep into this old chieftainess, do not laugh at what you see. … this was the cause of the introduction of death into the world”

Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology (1855), 'The Legend of Maui' · sacred-texts.com ↗

The image of a hero entering and closed within a vast body of night resonates with the chapter's theme of being swallowed, as the Large Magellanic Cloud is absorbed into the Milky Way.

Context

Hoping to win lasting life for people, Māui tries to pass through the body of the sleeping Hine-nui-te-pō, great lady of the night and of death. One of the small birds watching him laughs, she wakes and closes on him, and Māui dies, so death remains in the world.

Boorong (Lake Tyrrell, north-west Victoria, Australia)

The brolga pair in the sky

“Kourt-chin (Magellan Clouds).—The larger cloud a male, and the lesser cloud a female Native Companion.”

W. E. Stanbridge, 'On the astronomy and mythology of the aborigines of Victoria', read before the Philosophical Institute of Victoria, 30 September 1857 (published 1858; reprinted 1861) · dn760104.eu.archive.org ↗

The Boorong saw the Large Magellanic Cloud as a living being with a partner, and the science chapter follows that same cloud as it is drawn into the Milky Way.

Context

Stanbridge's record of sky knowledge shared by Boorong people of the Lake Tyrrell mallee country (he spells the name 'Booroung') names the two Magellanic Clouds Kourt-chin and sees them as a pair of brolgas, or 'native companions': the larger cloud male, the smaller female. Other Aboriginal nations hold their own, different stories of the Clouds.

XVIIn ~4-5 billion years

Andromeda draws near

Andromeda draws near

Andromeda, a spiral galaxy somewhat larger than our own, lies 2.5 million light-years away and is closing in at about 110 km/s (roughly 250,000 mph). Today it is a small, faint, fuzzy patch to the naked eye, though its full disc spans several times the width of the full Moon. The approach is so slow that for billions of years the sky barely changes: NASA's 2012 visualisations, which assumed a head-on orbit, showed its disc 'noticeably larger' after 2 billion years and filling the field of view at 3.75 billion years. The newest analysis (Sawala et al. 2025), using Hubble and Gaia data and the pull of M33 and the Large Magellanic Cloud, gives only about a 2% chance of that head-on collision within 4-5 billion years. Using the earlier Gaia-based best estimates (van der Marel et al. 2019), which the new study reproduces, the first close pass comes about 4.5 billion years from now, at roughly 100 kiloparsecs (about 330,000 light-years).

Choose a future

In the branch where the galaxies are destined to merge, the first fly-by comes within roughly 200 kiloparsecs and dark-matter friction takes hold. Andromeda swells across the night sky (at a 100-kiloparsec pass its bright disc would span roughly 20-25 degrees, about 40-50 full Moons, by simple scaling) while tidal forces warp both discs and draw out arcs of stars.

How we know

The approach speed comes from the Doppler shift of Andromeda's light; its far smaller sideways motion, only tens of microarcseconds per year, was measured by Hubble (2012) and Gaia (2019 onward). The future is then explored by running many thousands of orbit simulations that sample every measurement's error bars; Andromeda's sideways (transverse) velocity is the biggest remaining uncertainty.

  • Distance 2.5 million light-years; approaching at about 250,000 mph (~110 km/s) (NASA/STScI 2012)
  • Classic Hubble-based model: first pericentre in 3.87 (+0.42/-0.32) billion years, 41% chance of a direct hit within 25 kpc (van der Marel et al. 2012, ApJ)
  • Gaia update: collision 'not in 3.9 billion years' time, but in 4.5 billion', 'more of a glancing blow' (ESA 2019, van der Marel et al. 2019)
  • Merger within 10 billion years: 54% in the full MW-M31-M33-LMC system; 44% two-body; 63% with M33 only; 37% with LMC only (Sawala et al. 2025)
  • Head-on collision within 4-5 billion years: ~2% (Sawala et al. 2025, via University of Helsinki / Durham / ESA releases)

Latest2025: Sawala et al. (Nature Astronomy, 'No certainty of a Milky Way-Andromeda collision') found that, with Gaia DR3 and Hubble data and M33 and the LMC included, there is close to a 50% chance of no Milky Way-Andromeda merger in the next 10 billion years; 'Based on the best available data, the fate of our Galaxy is still completely open.'

Sources: NASA (2012): NASA's Hubble Shows Milky Way is Destined for Head-on Collision · Sawala et al. 2025, No certainty of a Milky Way-Andromeda collision (Nature Astronomy) · ESA/Hubble heic2508 (2025): Apocalypse when? Hubble casts doubt on certainty of galactic collision · ESA (2019): Gaia clocks new speeds for Milky Way-Andromeda collision

Shared thread

Signs in the heavens

Aratus praised Zeus for setting signs in heaven; Isaiah sees the heavens rolled together as a scroll; Mexica priests watched the Pleiades cross the zenith to know the world would go on; a Chinese ode sets the Weaver and the Ox stars on either side of the River of Heaven. Al-Sufi wrote down Andromeda as a little cloud a thousand years ago. Over billions of years it will grow in our sky; in some futures, until it fills it.

In the traditions

Islamic astronomy

A little cloud in Andromeda

Working in Shiraz for the Buyid ruler ʿAdud al-Dawla, al-Sufi revised Ptolemy's star catalogue with Arabic star names and new observations. He recorded a 'little cloud' near Andromeda, the earliest known description of the Andromeda Galaxy, crediting earlier astronomers of Isfahan. This is a work of science from the Islamic world, not a religious text.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

The faint smudge al-Sufi noted a thousand years ago is the galaxy now heading toward our own, and a possible future partner of the Milky Way.

Judaism and Christianity (Hebrew Bible, Isaiah)

Rolled together as a scroll

“And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine”

King James Version (1611), Isaiah 34:4 · sacred-texts.com ↗

The whole sky changing its shape echoes the slow transformation of the night sky as Andromeda swells toward us, a sign in the heavens unfolding over billions of years.

Context

In an oracle of judgment on the nations, and Edom in particular, the starry host dissolves and the sky is rolled up like a scroll. Many Jewish and Christian interpreters read this as poetic language for political upheaval, while others read it as a picture of the world's end. The image recurs in Revelation 6:14 and in the Qur'an (21:104), where God rolls up the heavens as a written scroll is rolled.

Chinese (Shijing, Book of Poetry)

Weaver and Ox beside the Han

In the ode 'Da Dong' (Mao 203), a complaint from the eastern states, the singer looks up at the Han, the River of Heaven, and sees the Weaving Girl stars pass through seven stations in a day without weaving any cloth, and the bright Draught Ox stars that pull no carriage. Here they are idle stars on either side of the Milky Way, not yet lovers; the story of their yearly meeting developed later, by the Han dynasty. (Paraphrased from Legge's translation.)

Paraphrase · chinesenotes.com ↗

Two figures facing each other across the Milky Way, later imagined as meeting, lend an old image to two galaxies drawing together across the sky.

Greek (Aratus, Phaenomena)

Signs set in heaven

“For himself it was who set the signs in heaven, and marked out the constellations”

Aratus, Phaenomena, proem (c. lines 10-12), trans. G. R. Mair, Loeb Classical Library (1921) · theoi.com ↗

Aratus treats the night sky as a set of signs to watch; the galaxy named for his constellation Andromeda will itself become a growing sign in the sky, read through measurement rather than omen.

Context

Aratus' Hellenistic poem on the constellations (3rd century BCE) opens by praising Zeus, who arranged the stars as signs so that people could read the seasons for sowing and sailing. The poem goes on to describe the figures of the sky, Andromeda among them.

Finnish (Kalevala)

The sun and moon return

After Louhi, mistress of Pohjola, has hidden the sun and moon inside a mountain (Rune 47) and left Kalevala in darkness, the two lights come free and reappear in the sky. Väinämöinen goes out to see them, greets them as bringers of good fortune, and asks the sun to rise each morning over sowing, fishing and hunting (Rune 49; John Martin Crawford's 1888 translation of Lönnrot's epic, compiled from Finnish and Karelian oral song).

Paraphrase · sacred-texts.com ↗

The return of lights to the sky, greeted as a reunion, parallels the chapter's image of a neighbouring galaxy drawing nearer and growing brighter in the night.

Mexica (Aztec)

Watching the Pleiades cross

“As the first day of the fifty-third year dawned the people narrowly observed the Pleiades, for if they passed the zenith”

Lewis Spence, The Myths of Mexico and Peru (1913), ch. I, 'The Dread of the Last Day' · gutenberg.org ↗

Reading the fate of an age from a sign moving overhead echoes the chapter's attention to what the night sky will show as Andromeda draws near, here as watchfulness rather than forecast.

Context

Spence, drawing on Spanish colonial-era sources such as Sahagún, describes how the Mexica feared the world might end at the close of each 52-year calendar cycle. Fires were put out, and when the Pleiades were seen to pass the zenith a new fire was kindled and carried out to relight the cold hearths. Spence's is a secondary, early 20th-century summary.

XVIIIn ~5.5 to 7.7 billion years

The Sun becomes a red giant

The Sun swells into a red giant

In roughly 5.4-6.4 billion years, when the Sun is about 10-11 billion years old, the hydrogen in its core runs out and it begins to swell. About 7.6 billion years from now it reaches the tip of the red-giant branch, about 2,700 times today's luminosity and about 256 times its present radius (roughly 1.2 AU), having already blown away about a third of its mass; then helium ignites in its core in a 'helium flash' and the Sun settles down as a smaller (about 11 solar radii) helium-burning star for roughly 130 million years. A final swelling on the asymptotic giant branch follows, and as the Sun keeps losing mass its gravitational grip weakens, so the planets' orbits widen. Mercury and Venus are swallowed; Earth's fate is close: its orbit should widen to about 1.5 AU, but in Schröder & Smith's model tidal drag from the giant's outer layers pulls it inward and it is engulfed. The exposed core briefly lights a faint planetary nebula, then remains as a white dwarf of about 0.54 solar masses, roughly the size of Earth.

The red-giant Sun drawn to scale with the inner planets’ orbitsAt its largest the Sun reaches about 1.19 AU, past the orbits of Mercury and Venus and Earth’s present orbit; Earth’s orbit widens to about 1.5 AU as the Sun loses mass.MercuryVenusEarthMarsEarth’s widened orbitSun today: a speckRed giant at its largest · ~1.19 AUolder model · ~0.79 AU1 AU
Drawn to scale. Peak size from Schröder & Smith (2008); the dotted line is an older model (Sackmann et al. 1993). Whether Earth is finally swallowed is still debated.

How we know

Stellar-evolution codes, tested against star clusters (whose stars share one age) and against the red giants, planetary nebulae and white dwarfs we see today, trace the Sun's future. The biggest uncertainty is how fast giant stars lose mass, which controls both their maximum size and how far the planets drift outward.

  • Main sequence ends at a solar age of ~10.0 billion years (Schröder & Smith 2008) or ~11 billion years (Sackmann, Boothroyd & Kraemer 1993): ~5.4-6.4 billion years from now
  • Tip of the red-giant branch at age 12.17 billion years: 2,730 L☉, Teff ~2,600 K, 256 R☉ ≈ 1.19 AU, mass 0.668 M☉ (Schröder & Smith 2008); older model: 2,300 L☉ and 170 R☉ ≈ 0.79 AU (Sackmann et al. 1993)
  • Asymptotic giant branch: 149 R☉ (0.69 AU) at tip-AGB and 179 R☉ (0.83 AU) at the final thermal pulse, smaller than at the RGB tip (Schröder & Smith 2008); Sackmann et al. 1993 instead give an AGB maximum of 213 R☉ (0.99 AU)
  • Mass lost: 0.332 M☉ by the RGB tip, ~0.544 M☉ left at the end of the AGB, i.e. ~46% shed (Schröder & Smith 2008)
  • Earth's orbit would widen to ~1.50 AU without tides, yet Earth is engulfed via tidal drag; escaping would need a present-day orbit of ≳1.15 AU (Schröder & Smith 2008)

Latest2024: Zhang et al. (Nature Astronomy) used microlensing to find an Earth-mass planet (about twice Earth's mass) orbiting a white dwarf of about half the Sun's mass at more than twice the Earth-Sun distance, a possible example of a rocky planet surviving its star's giant phases by drifting outward, as Earth might (though Earth's oceans would be long gone). Related: a 2023 'star swallows planet' outburst (De et al., Nature) was re-examined with JWST in 2025 (Lau et al.), which found the host was probably a main-sequence star, not a red giant.

Sources: Schröder & Smith 2008, Distant future of the Sun and Earth revisited (arXiv:0801.4031) · University of Manchester (2018): What will happen when our Sun dies? (Gesicki et al., Nature Astronomy) · Eos (2024): Earth may survive the Sun's demise (Zhang et al. 2024, Nature Astronomy) · NASA Planetary Fact Sheet (ratio to Earth values)

Shared thread

The sun grows fierce

Endings by fire are among the most widespread: Phaethon’s runaway chariot scorching the earth, Kṛṣṇa’s blazing mouths in the Gītā, “the elements shall melt with fervent heat” in 2 Peter, the seven suns of the Vishnu Purana, the Druids’ teaching that fire and water will one day prevail. The Sun’s own end is a slow fire: over hundreds of millions of years it swells until it reaches the inner planets.

In the traditions

Islam

When the sun is folded up

“When the sun is folded up, And when the stars do fall”

E. H. Palmer (tr.), The Qur'an (1880), Sura 81:1–2 · sacred-texts.com ↗

A sun extinguished and a cosmos rolled up and remade echo, as themes, the Sun's eventual end in about five billion years and the cycles in which stars die and seed new ones.

Context

Among the signs of the Last Hour, the sun is wrapped up and loses its light (kuwwirat) and the stars fall or grow dim (inkadarat). Elsewhere God rolls up the heavens like a scroll and then restores creation as it was first brought forth (21:104). Muslims read these as signs of the Day of Judgment, literally or symbolically.

Christianity (New Testament)

Elements melt with fervent heat

“the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

King James Version (1611), 2 Peter 3:10 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

Fire on a cosmic scale and melting elements echo the red-giant Sun swelling to engulf the inner planets, though the letter speaks of judgment and renewal, not stellar physics.

Context

Answering scoffers who said nothing ever changes, the letter says the day of the Lord will come unexpectedly, with the heavens passing away and the elements (Greek stoicheia) dissolving in fire, followed by 'new heavens and a new earth' (3:13). Interpreters differ on whether stoicheia means physical elements or heavenly bodies, and the oldest Greek manuscripts say the earth and its works 'will be found' (laid bare) rather than 'burned up'.

Hindu (Puranas)

Seven Suns and Brahmā's Night

“the seven solar rays dilate to seven suns, whose radiance glows above, below, and on every side, and sets the three worlds and Pátála on fire.”

H. H. Wilson (1840), The Vishnu Purana, Book VI, Chapter 3 · sacred-texts.com ↗

On a similar scale of billions of years, our Sun will swell into a red giant in about 5 billion years and scorch the inner planets: an echo of imagery, not a forecast.

Context

A thousand cycles of the four ages make one day of Brahmā, which Wilson calculates as 4,320,000,000 years, followed by a night of equal length. At the end of a day the sun's rays swell into seven suns that burn the worlds; Brahmā sleeps, and on waking creates the universe anew. Carl Sagan remarked in Cosmos (1980) that these time scales happen, by accident, to resemble modern cosmology's.

Hinduism (Bhagavad Gītā)

Worlds swallowed by blazing mouths

“Swallowing all these people, you are licking them over and over again from all sides, with your blazing mouths. Your fierce splendours, O Vishnu! filling the whole universe with (their) effulgence, are heating it.”

Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang (1882), The Bhagavadgîtâ, Sacred Books of the East vol. 8, chapter XI, verse 30 · sacred-texts.com ↗

A blazing presence that takes in whole worlds parallels the red-giant Sun expanding to engulf Mercury and Venus.

Context

In the eleventh chapter Arjuna is shown Krishna's universal form, which first appears as if a thousand suns burst forth at once in the sky (11.12) and then turns terrifying as worlds stream into flaming mouths; the god declares himself kāla, which Telang renders 'death' and others 'time' (11.32). The Sanskrit lokān can mean 'worlds' or 'peoples', and the vision is usually read as a revelation of divine sovereignty and of Arjuna's duty, not as a description of physical events.

Roman (Ovid, Phaethon)

Phaethon scorches the earth

“Great cities perish with their walls, and peopled nations are consumed to dust. … the universe confused will plunge once more to ancient Chaos.”

Ovid, Metamorphoses II, trans. Brookes More (1922) · theoi.com ↗

A sun that comes too near and scorches the land parallels the red giant phase, when the swollen Sun will reach the inner planets.

Context

Phaethon, son of the Sun, begs to drive his father's chariot for one day, loses control, and brings the sun too close to the earth. Rivers boil, forests and cities burn, and Earth herself appeals to Jupiter, warning that the whole world will fall back into Chaos, before Jupiter strikes the boy down.

Celtic (Gaulish Druids, as reported by Strabo)

Fire and water will prevail

“not only the Druids, but others as well, say that men's souls, and also the universe, are indestructible, although both fire and water will at some time or other prevail over them.”

Strabo, Geography 4.4.4, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, Loeb Classical Library vol. II (1923) · penelope.uchicago.edu ↗

The pairing of a world that endures with a coming time of fire parallels the red giant phase, when the Sun will scorch the inner planets while the galaxy itself goes on.

Context

The Greek geographer Strabo, writing around the turn of the era and drawing on earlier writers such as Posidonius, reports that the Druids and other learned men of Gaul taught that souls and the universe endure, yet that fire and water would one day overpower the world. This is an outsider's report; no Gaulish account of the teaching survives.

Cherokee

The Sun's deadly heat

“she sent down such sultry rays that there was a great fever and the people died by hundreds”

James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900), 'The Daughter of the Sun' · sacred-texts.com ↗

The story imagines the Sun's heat turning from life-giving to deadly, a theme that parallels the future Sun as it swells and scorches the inner solar system.

Context

In this Cherokee story the Sun, a woman, grows angry with the people and sends down heat so fierce that many die of fever. After her daughter is killed she hides in grief and the world goes dark, and her weeping threatens a flood until young singers and dancers comfort her.

XVIIIIn ~6-10 billion years, or not at all

Milkomeda, or alone

Milkomeda, or alone

In the classic models, Andromeda's first close pass came about 3-4 billion years from now and the two galaxies coalesced roughly 2-2.5 billion years later, about 5.4-5.9 billion years from now (Cox & Loeb 2008; van der Marel et al. 2012). In the newest Monte Carlo study, a merger happens in only about half of the possible futures, and when it does, the median time is about 7.6-8 billion years. Even in a full collision, stars are so far apart that essentially none hit each other: the collision plays out between gravity, gas clouds and dark-matter halos, not between stars. Which future we get hinges mostly on Andromeda's still poorly measured sideways motion.

Choose a future

After one or two wide swings, the two spirals' discs are scrambled into a single smooth, rounded elliptical galaxy that Cox & Loeb named 'Milkomeda' (popularly 'Milkdromeda'). Much of the gas has been used up before the final merger, so star formation fades rather than exploding; the two central black holes (about 4.3 million and 140 million solar masses) sink to the middle and, in one simulation, merge within ~17 million years of the galaxies, releasing gravitational waves. The Sun most likely ends up farther from the centre than today (85% odds), with about a 10% chance of being more than 50 kiloparsecs (160,000 light-years) out.

How we know

Computer simulations of the two galaxies (stars, gas and dark matter) are started from the measured positions, velocities and masses and run many times with the inputs varied within their error bars. Outcomes such as the remnant's shape, its star formation and the Sun's final orbit are statistics over those runs; the Sun is represented by 'candidate Suns' placed about 8 kpc from the Milky Way's centre.

  • Classic: first pericentre 3.87 billion years, merger 5.86 (+1.61/-0.72) billion years; the Sun ends at a larger radius with p = 85% and beyond 50 kpc with p = 10%; the remnant resembles an elliptical (van der Marel et al. 2012, ApJ)
  • Cox & Loeb 2008 (MNRAS): first passage 2.8 ± 0.5 billion years, merger 5.4 ± 0.4 billion years (all models merged by 6.2); Sun beyond 20 kpc in the remnant 68%, beyond 30 kpc 54%; 2.7% chance it is briefly bound to Andromeda
  • When a merger happens, the median time is 7.6 billion years (20-kpc threshold) or 8.0 billion years (10-kpc threshold); 46% of scenarios have no merger within 10 billion years, and most of these never approach closer than ~200 kpc (Sawala et al. 2025)
  • Black holes: Sgr A* ≈ 4.3 million M☉ (GRAVITY Collaboration 2022); M31* ≈ 1.4 × 10^8 M☉ (Bender et al. 2005)
  • In one N-body model the black holes coalesce less than 16.6 million years after the galaxies merge (Schiavi et al. 2020, A&A)

Latest2025: Sawala et al. (Nature Astronomy): with M33 and the LMC included, a Milky Way-Andromeda merger within 10 billion years occurs in 54% of scenarios (48% using older Hubble + Gaia DR2 proper motions), with a median merger time of 7.6 billion years, later than the classic ~5-6 billion years.

Sources: van der Marel et al. 2012, The M31 velocity vector III: future Milky Way-M31-M33 orbital evolution, merging, and fate of the Sun (arXiv:1205.6865) · Cox & Loeb 2008, The collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda (arXiv:0705.1170) · Schiavi et al. 2020, Future merger of the Milky Way with the Andromeda galaxy and the fate of their supermassive black holes (A&A) · Sawala et al. 2025, No certainty of a Milky Way-Andromeda collision (Nature Astronomy)

Shared thread

Two become one, or each its own way

Many traditions end in renewal: a new heaven and a new earth, the earth quickened again in Latter-day Saint scripture, a green earth rising after Ragnarök, the Zoroastrian renovation, a new world above the old in Hopi telling, day after the long night in the Kumulipo. Zhuangzi says that Heaven, Earth and I were produced together, and all things and I are one. A Dinka story offers the other outcome: sky and earth, once joined, drawing apart. For the two galaxies, the latest calculation is close to a coin toss.

In the traditions

Christianity

A new heaven and a new earth

“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”

King James Version (1611; standard 1769 text), Revelation 21:1 · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

An ending that is also a renewal echoes one possible future for the Milky Way: a merger with Andromeda, which recent studies put at roughly even odds over the next 10 billion years, in which two galaxies would become one.

Context

Drawing on Isaiah's promise of new heavens and a new earth, the Bible's closing vision sees the old creation pass away and God declare 'Behold, I make all things new' (21:5). Christians read it as a literal future renewal, as symbol, or as both.

Latter-day Saint scripture (Doctrine and Covenants)

The earth quickened again

“Wherefore, it shall be sanctified; yea, notwithstanding it shall die, it shall be quickened again, and shall abide the power by which it is quickened, and the righteous shall inherit it.”

Doctrine and Covenants 88:26 (revelation to Joseph Smith, 1832–33; first published 1835) · churchofjesuschrist.org ↗

An ending that becomes a renewal into a larger glory echoes the possibility that two galaxies close their separate histories and continue as one new system.

Context

This revelation says the earth itself 'abideth the law of a celestial kingdom' (88:25): it will die and be quickened, renewed and glorified as a home for the righteous. Latter-day Saints often read it alongside Moses 1:38, where as one earth passes away 'even so shall another come', a picture of creation as ongoing rather than final.

Baháʼí Faith (ʻAbdu'l-Bahá)

Worlds that form and dissolve

In Some Answered Questions, chapter 47 (talks given in ʻAkká in 1904–06, first published in English in 1908), ʻAbdu'l-Bahá teaches that the universe as a whole has no beginning, but each world or globe, being a composition of elements, has a beginning and therefore an end; one may form or break apart while existence as a whole continues. He describes elements combining over long ages into countless forms and ties this to God's eternal creativity. (Paraphrased; the 1908 wording could not be confirmed.)

Paraphrase · bahai-library.com ↗

Galaxies that combine into new composite forms while the wider cosmos carries on mirror this picture of continual composition and decomposition.

Jainism

The ever-turning wheel of time

Jain cosmology has no creator and no first or last moment: time turns as a wheel (kālacakra) of two half-cycles, a descending avasarpiṇī in which happiness, lifespan and virtue decline through six ages, and an ascending utsarpiṇī in which the order reverses. Jains hold that we live in the fifth age of a descending half, and the darkest age gives way to renewal, not annihilation. Traditional cosmographies describe the turning points vividly, while many modern accounts stress that the change is gradual.

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

Decline that gives way to renewal without any absolute end parallels a merger that closes two galaxies' separate stories while their stars carry on in a new arrangement.

Chinese (Daoist, Zhuangzi)

All things and I are one

“Heaven, Earth, and I were produced together, and all things and I are one.”

James Legge (1891), The Writings of Kwang-dze, Sacred Books of the East vol. 39, Book II (Khî Wû Lun), paragraph 6 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Two great systems of stars giving up their separate identities in one merged galaxy offers a cosmic-scale image of many things becoming one.

Context

In the chapter on 'the adjustment of controversies', Zhuangzi says the self, Heaven and Earth, and the myriad things belong to one process, then immediately asks whether such oneness can even be put into words. Interpreters differ on whether he affirms a mystical unity or is playfully showing the limits of language; the same chapter ends with the butterfly dream and 'the Transformation of Things'.

Zoroastrian

The world made new

“the fire and halo melt the metal of Shatvaîrô, in the hills and mountains, and it remains on this earth like a river. ... the world is immortal for ever and everlasting.”

E. W. West (1880), Pahlavi Texts Part I (SBE 5), Bundahis XXX.19, 32 · sacred-texts.com ↗

An ending by fire that leads to a transformed world sits beside the scientific future of a swelling Sun and a possible merger with Andromeda, a future that involves no moral renewal.

Context

At the end of time the metal in the mountains melts into a molten river that all must pass through. Evil is destroyed, and the world is renewed as a perfected earth that lasts for ever. Zoroastrians call this renewal Frashokereti.

Greek (Plato, Statesman myth)

The cosmos takes the helm again

In Plato's Statesman, a visiting Stranger tells a myth in which the cosmos alternates between eras. Guided by the god it turns one way; released, it reverses and slowly runs down, until the god takes the helm again and renews it.

Paraphrase · gutenberg.org ↗

The myth pictures the whole cosmos changing course and being remade, a philosophical parallel to a merger that would turn two galaxies into one new system.

Norse

Ragnarök, and the earth anew

“The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea,
The hot stars down from heaven are whirled; ... Now do I see the earth anew
Rise all green from the waves again;”

Henry Adams Bellows (1923), The Poetic Edda, Voluspo 57, 59 · sacred-texts.com ↗

An ending by fire followed by renewal is a mythic frame beside the far future: a red-giant Sun, and the Milky Way and Andromeda perhaps merging into a new galaxy.

Context

At Ragnarök the sun goes dark, the stars fall, fire leaps against the sky and the earth sinks into the sea. Then the seeress sees a green earth rise again from the waves, where surviving gods gather and fields grow unsown.

Hopi

Climbing into a new world

In early-1900s Hopi tellings recorded by Voth, people leave a lower world torn by quarrels and wrongdoing. They climb up through an opening (the sípapu) on plants grown for the purpose and emerge into a dark, cold world, where their chiefs then make the moon and sun. The numbered 'Four Worlds' scheme known today comes mostly from later, contested sources, and versions vary by village and clan.

Paraphrase · sacred-texts.com ↗

Leaving one world for the next is a resonant image for a galaxy that keeps changing into new forms over billions of years.

Hawaiian (Kumulipo)

After the long night, day

“The child of Uli, of Uli of Ke,
The child in the time of numerous night, … ’Tis day.”

The Kumulipo, Eighth Era, trans. Queen Liliʻuokalani, An Account of the Creation of the World According to Hawaiian Tradition (1897) · sacred-texts.com ↗

The turn from many eras of night to 'day' is an image of a world remade, a theme that parallels two galaxies settling into a single new form.

Context

The Kumulipo, a Hawaiian genealogical chant of creation tied to the chiefly line of Kalākaua and Liliʻuokalani, moves through long eras of night (pō). In the eighth era the gods Kāne and Kanaloa, the woman Laʻilaʻi and the first human ancestors are born, and the chant declares that it is day.

Dinka (South Sudan)

The rope between sky and earth

In Dinka tradition sky and earth were once close, joined by a rope, and Divinity (Nhialic) was near to people. When the first woman, Abuk, overstepped a limit while working grain (versions differ on how she struck Divinity), Divinity withdrew and sent a small blue bird to cut the rope, and people came to know labour, sickness and death. Versions vary between Dinka groups; the classic study is Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience (1961).

Paraphrase · en.wikipedia.org ↗

Where the chapter weighs two great bodies becoming one, the Dinka story offers the other outcome, closeness followed by parting, a reminder that the galaxies may also pass each other by.

XIXIn ~10 billion years (and beyond)

Ten billion years on

A cooling ember, an ageing galaxy

Ten billion years from now the Sun has been a white dwarf for about 2 billion years: an Earth-sized ball of carbon and oxygen holding about half its former mass, no longer generating energy, only cooling. By then its surface has cooled to roughly 6,000 K, about the temperature of the Sun's surface today, but it is so small that it gives off only about two ten-thousandths (0.02%) of the Sun's present light. Around it the galaxy's stars are older and redder, because few new hot blue stars are being born to replace those that die. Looking beyond the 10-billion-year horizon, and assuming dark energy stays constant: the accelerating expansion carries every galaxy outside the Local Group out of view on a timescale of about 100 billion years, and star formation dwindles as gas runs out over trillions of years, with the last dim red dwarfs fading by about 10^13-10^14 years.

Choose a future

If the merger happened, the sky seen from a planet still circling the white-dwarf Sun is dominated by Milkomeda's smooth, featureless glow: no Milky Way band, just an ancient elliptical full of old, reddish stars. Beyond 10 billion years, around 100 billion years after the Big Bang, Milkomeda becomes the only galaxy within our cosmic horizon, and hypervelocity stars ejected from it are the only extragalactic light (Loeb 2011).

How we know

White-dwarf cooling models are calibrated on many thousands of white dwarfs measured by Gaia and on the ages of star clusters; the cosmic far future extrapolates today's measured expansion rate and dark energy, plus present gas-consumption rates. These beyond-10-billion-year figures are the least certain in the whole act.

  • Sun's white dwarf: ~0.54 M☉ (Schröder & Smith 2008); white dwarfs are 'only about the size of the Earth', R ~ 0.01 R☉ ('White dwarf fundamentals' review, arXiv:2409.03941)
  • After ~2 to 2.3 billion years of cooling, the Sun's remnant is ~5,800-6,100 K and ~2 × 10^-4 of today's solar luminosity (Montreal white-dwarf cooling models, 0.55 M☉; Bédard et al. 2020)
  • Beyond 10 Gyr: distant structures leave the horizon 'in a timescale on the order of 100 billion years' (Krauss & Scherrer 2007)
  • Beyond 10 Gyr: ~10^11 years after the Big Bang, Milkomeda 'will be the only galaxy remaining within our event horizon' (Loeb 2011, JCAP)
  • Beyond 10 Gyr: interstellar gas exhausted after ~10^12-10^13 years; the lowest-mass stars burn for ~10^13 years (Adams & Laughlin 1997, Rev. Mod. Phys.)

Latest2025: DESI's second data release (19 March 2025) reported 2.8-4.2σ evidence that dark energy may be weakening over time rather than being a constant. Not yet a 5σ discovery, but if confirmed, the forecast that all other galaxies vanish from view in ~100 billion years (derived for constant dark energy) would need revisiting.

Sources: Loeb 2011, Cosmology with Hypervelocity Stars (arXiv:1102.0007) · Krauss & Scherrer 2007, The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology (arXiv:0704.0221) · Adams & Laughlin 1997, A Dying Universe: The Long Term Fate and Evolution of Astrophysical Objects (arXiv:astro-ph/9701131) · UT Dallas (2025): Evidence mounts for evolving dark energy, DESI results find

Shared thread

The long rest

Some traditions end not in fire but in stillness or quiet return: in the Qur’an all things pass and the Face of the Lord endures; in a hymn of Guru Nanak the Creator alone is immortal; in the Book of the Dead creation sinks back into the primeval waters; Zhuangzi finds rest at death; the |xam Moon keeps its backbone and grows again; Jain time keeps turning. Ten billion years from now the Sun is a cooling ember the size of the Earth, in an old red galaxy.

In the traditions

Islam (Qur'an)

The face of thy Lord endures

“Every one upon it is transient, but the face of thy Lord endowed with majesty and honour shall endure.”

E. H. Palmer (1880), The Qur'ân, Sacred Books of the East vol. 9, Sura LV (The Merciful), verses 26–27 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Set beside a future of a cooling white dwarf and an aging galaxy, the verse draws a line between what fades and what is held to endure.

Context

Amid Sura al-Raḥmān's catalogue of blessings in earth and sky, these verses say that all on the earth passes away while God's 'face' remains. Classical exegetes often read 'face' as God's very self, and theologians debated how to understand such language; compare 28:88.

Jain

Uncreated, Unending, Ever-Turning

“Those who on arguments of their own maintain that the world has been created, do not know the truth. Nor will (the world) ever perish.”

Hermann Jacobi (1895), Jaina Sūtras Part II (SBE 45), Sūtrakṛtāṅga I.1.3.9 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Standard cosmology traces a beginning 13.8 billion years ago; Jain thought offers a deliberate contrast, echoed in the cyclic models some physicists have explored.

Context

Jain teaching holds that the universe (loka) was never created and will never end; it is made of eternal substances following their own natures. Time turns as a wheel of rising and falling half-cycles, each with six eras of immense length, repeating forever.

Sikhism (Guru Granth Sahib)

The Creator alone is immortal

“Everything that came into this world shall depart; the Creator alone is immortal. Be sure to praise the True One and love His abode.”

Max Arthur Macauliffe (1909), The Sikh Religion, vol. 1, hymns of Guru Nanak, Sri Rag ashtapadi (Guru Granth Sahib) · sacred-texts.com ↗

Beside a galaxy that grows old and dim, the hymn sets everything that arrives and departs against the One held to remain.

Context

In a hymn of Guru Nanak, the singer, alarmed at the 'terrible mountain' of worldly life, accepts that all who come must go and turns to praise of the One. Elsewhere, in the Japji, Guru Nanak speaks of a single word by which the world was expanded and of the One who 'is and shall be'. Macauliffe's early translation is fairly literal and sometimes differs from modern renderings.

Chinese (Daoist and Neo-Confucian)

Returning to the Root

“All things alike go through their processes of activity, and (then) we see them return (to their original state).”

James Legge (1891), The Tâo Teh King (SBE 39), ch. 16 · sacred-texts.com ↗

Dying stars return their material to interstellar gas, from which new stars and planets form, though in the far future less and less of it is renewed into new stars.

Context

The Daodejing sees all things flourish and then 'return to the root'. The Song-dynasty thinker Shao Yong set out a cosmic cycle of 129,600 years in which heaven and earth open and finally close before a new cycle begins.

Chinese (Daoist, Zhuangzi)

At death I find rest

“There is the great Mass (of nature);--I find the support of my body on it; my life is spent in toil on it; my old age seeks ease on it; at death I find rest in it”

James Legge (1891), The Writings of Kwang-dze, Sacred Books of the East vol. 39, Book VI (Tâ Zung Shih), paragraph 6 · sacred-texts.com ↗

A Sun settling into a long, cooling rest as a white dwarf, in a galaxy past its age of star-making, echoes the image of rest at the end of long labor.

Context

Zhuangzi pictures the great clod of nature (dakuai) carrying a person through life, labor, old age and death, and concludes that what makes life good makes death good too. The chapter treats death as a return within nature's ongoing transformations; Daoist and other readers differ on whether this is consolation, detachment or a critique of clinging to life.

Greek (Stoic)

Conflagration and rebirth

“who at stated periods of time absorbs into himself the whole of substance and again creates it from himself”

R. D. Hicks (1925), Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers VII.137 · cts.perseids.org ↗

Cosmic cycles echo questions modern cosmology still asks about the far future, though current evidence points to continued expansion rather than a return to fire.

Context

The Stoics taught that at fixed intervals the divine fire takes all matter back into itself in a universal conflagration (ekpyrosis), then generates a new world, in an endless cycle.

Egyptian (Book of the Dead, ch. 175)

Return to the primeval waters

“I am doing away with all that I did when this earth came into being from Nu … and when it sprang from the watery abyss even as it was in the days of old.”

Book of the Dead, ch. 175 (Papyrus of Ani, Plates XXIX-XXX), trans. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (1895) · sacred-texts.com ↗

An ending pictured as a return to the dark, still waters from which everything began echoes the long, quiet age of a galaxy whose stars have mostly burned out.

Context

Chapter 175 is a dialogue between the deceased and the creator Atum (Tmu) about how long life will last; Atum promises millions upon millions of years, and the text speaks of creation sinking back into the primeval waters of Nu, with only the creator and Osiris remaining, in the form of serpents. In Budge's 1895 rendering this damaged passage is spoken by Ani; later translators give the words to Atum.

Norse (Poetic Edda)

The sun's daughter rides on

“A daughter bright Alfrothul bears
Ere Fenrir snatches her forth;
Her mother's paths shall the maiden tread
When the gods to death have gone.”

Vafþrúðnismál 47, The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923) · sacred-texts.com ↗

The idea that something of the sun continues after the sun itself is gone resonates with the white dwarf that will outlast the Sun's shining life, though that remnant is a fading ember rather than a new sun.

Context

Odin asks the wise giant Vafþrúðnir how the sun will return to the sky after Fenrir has taken it. The giant answers that Álfröðull ('elf-beam', a name for the sun) bears a daughter first, who will follow her mother's course in the renewed world; Snorri retells this in Gylfaginning ch. 53.

Wardaman (Aboriginal Australian)

Spirits circle through the sky

As shared publicly by Wardaman elder Bill Yidumduma Harney, spirits of the dead rise into the Milky Way, pass through ceremonies among the stars, and return to Earth (as falling stars) to be reborn. In Wardaman art the Milky Way also appears as a great serpent.

Paraphrase · arxiv.org ↗

A cycle of rising and returning parallels how stars die and seed new stars and planets with their material.

San (|xam)

The Moon dies and returns

“For, I, when I am dead, I again living return.”

W. H. I. Bleek & L. C. Lloyd (1911), Specimens of Bushman Folklore, 'The Origin of Death; Preceded by a Prayer Addressed to the Young Moon' · sacred-texts.com ↗

A cycle of dying and returning speaks to cosmic endings and renewal, as dying stars return their material to form new stars.

Context

The Moon, which wanes and returns, meant people to share its renewal. When the hare insisted its dead mother would not come back, the angry Moon split the hare's lip, and death became final for people.

|xam (San, southern Africa)

The Moon's backbone remains

“O Sun! leave for the children the backbone!”

W. H. I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd, Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911), section II, 'Sun and Moon' · sacred-texts.com ↗

A light cut back to its backbone yet never wholly gone offers a theme of what endures, alongside the Sun's future as a small, dense remnant core.

Context

In |xam narratives recorded in the 1870s, the Sun pierces the Moon with its knife and the Moon wastes away. The Moon pleads that its backbone be left 'for the children', and from that remnant it grows again into a new moon.

Synthesis

Where the accounts part

The shared threads are real, and so are the differences. These are the five that matter most.

Made from nothing, from something, or never made

Classical Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach creation from nothing. Latter-day Saint scripture teaches that eternal element was organized. Baháʼí teaching holds that creation as a whole has no beginning, Jain teaching that the universe was never created, and the Buddha set the question aside. Science says only that the universe we can trace began 13.8 billion years ago, and is silent on whether anything came before.

How long

Six days; a day of Brahmā of 4.32 billion years; 13.8 billion years. Carl Sagan observed that Hindu time scales happen to match those of modern cosmology, “no doubt by accident.” The match is not a measurement.

In what order

Genesis puts light before the Sun, which matches the cosmic record, and plants before the Sun, which does not. Most accounts place the Earth at the center. Astronomy finds it orbiting an ordinary star 27,000 light-years from the center of one galaxy among billions.

Asking what

Science describes how and when. Most of these texts ask who and why. Georges Lemaître, the priest who first proposed the Big Bang, kept the two questions apart and helped persuade Pope Pius XII not to present the theory as proof of creation.

How it ends

Some traditions expect an end by fire, some a renewal, some an endless turning, and some no end at all. The science expects a Sun that burns out and a universe that keeps expanding. Nothing in physics promises a cosmic renewal, and nothing in it rules out the questions the traditions ask about meaning.

Method

How this was made

Six research agents built Act I and three more built Act II, each group working in parallel. Separate agents that had not seen the work then checked every date, number and quotation against its source.

  • ScienceThe early universe, from the Planck time to cosmic dawn
  • ScienceGalactic archaeology: the Milky Way from its first stars to its future
  • TraditionsAbrahamic: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Latter-day Saint scripture, the Baháʼí Faith
  • TraditionsDharmic and East Asian: Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
  • TraditionsAncient Near East, Mediterranean and Northern Europe
  • TraditionsIndigenous Americas, Oceania and Australia, and Africa
  • Act IIThree more: the future of the Sun and the galaxy, and endings and renewals in all eight traditions

Quotations. Every verbatim quotation from a religious or mythic text comes from a translation published before 1929, so the wording is public domain and often old-fashioned; everything else is paraphrased. Translations carry their translators’ assumptions, and most traditions have versions that differ from the ones shown. 174 passages in all.

Respect. Indigenous material is limited to stories that communities have shared publicly, credited to the specific people. Sacred figures are not depicted.

The animation. The sky is illustrative, not a physics simulation. It follows the measured shape of the galaxy (a bar 5 kiloparsecs long, two major and two minor arms, a thin disk inside a thicker one, the Sun 8.3 kiloparsecs out), but colors in the early chapters are partly symbolic and the distances to the Magellanic Clouds and Andromeda are compressed. Act II’s two futures follow published scenarios; neither is a prediction.

Currency. Research current to 13 October 2026. Gaia’s fourth data release, due 2 December 2026, will refine many of these numbers.

Birth of the Milky Way · scroll back to the top to watch it again