What does the word ‘family’ mean to you? It can mean many things in our society. Some define family as a mother, a father and one or more children. For others, there don’t need to be children in the home for there to be a family. Where there are children, about three quarters of the parents will be married to each other.
In 2013 the Office of National Statistics, which is a government body which takes surveys on all manner of topics to help the government make policy (rules under which we all live), found that there were 18.2 million people living in this type of family. Many more of us have families which have a different make-up. For the purpose of the survey, a family is defined as people living in the same household.
However, as many of you will know, there are other ways in which we describe our family. There are children who have two parents of the same gender, there are children who have only one parent with whom they live, other children have guardians and live with aunts, uncles or grandparents.
What do you think of when you think “medieval”? Women in pointy hats stuck in castles? Damsels in distress waiting to be rescued by knights in shining armour? Think again. Women have been awesome in every age. In Anglo-Saxon England, they had more power than women in the Victorian age.
Everyone has their favourite song, their favourite film; some of us even have a favourite book. Carolyn Ward wants to know if you have a favourite poem.
Most scientists believe that the Universe began in a Big Bang around 14 billion years ago. The entire Universe was inside a bubble thousands of times smaller than a pinhead, and was hotter and denser than anything we can imagine.
When the explosion called the Big Bang happened, the Universe as we know it was born. In a fraction of a second, the Universe grew from smaller than a single atom to larger than a galaxy. It kept on growing, and is still expanding today.
Now researchers in America think they have found traces left in the sky that prove this that the Big Bang did really happen. It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes. These twists of light are called ‘gravitational waves’ – the effect is a little bit like how waves form on the surface when you drop a big stone in a pond. However, you also have to imagine that the Big Bang formed the pond itself.
The team leading the project, known as BICEP2, has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky. The aim was to find evidence of ‘inflation’ – the idea that the cosmos grew rapidly in its first trillionth, or trillionth of a trillionth of a second – growing from something unimaginably small to something about the size of a marble.
The leader of the team, Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said:
“This is opening a window on what we believe to be a new regime of physics – the physics of what happened in the first unbelievably tiny fraction of a second in the Universe.”
Over the coming years, scientists will work hard to investigate every aspect of this discovery. Other experiments will be carried out to see if they can replicate the findings of the American team. If this research is confirmed, it will be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time.
EDIT
Dr Sarah Bearchell drew our attention to this video, which explains the concept of gravity and gravitational waves with the help of a towel, an apple and a ping pong ball. Check it out
