the universe college essay

How the Universe Works Essay

For us, the Universe we live in is absolute and unlimited. We think it existed, exists and will always exist, although something inside us has never ceased to claim that everything has a beginning. There are a lot of the Universe origin theories, and the most famous one is probably the Big Bang Theory, according to which there was a great explosion of dense matter and energy 13 billion years ago, which resulted in what we nowadays call the Universe. Many scientists also believe that the Big Bang was just a cycle in an endless series of matter explosions, which has neither a beginning nor an end. Points of view differ, and the dispute lasts for centuries because of the attempts to understand and organize the stardate back to ancient times.

Over time the Universe was divided into galaxies, which nowadays are numbered in millions. More and more of them are being opened, so even the scientists cannot tell the exact number of the existing ones, although they managed to classify them into three main types: Spiral, Elliptical and Irregular. But whatever the type of Galaxy is, each one is composed of numerous stars, planets, asteroids, meteoroids intergalactic gas and black matter.

The Galaxy we have the pleasure to live in is called The Milky Way and refers to a type of spiral galaxy. It has a form of a flat disc with a large bulge in the middle. The Earth used to be considered the centre of our Galaxy for a very long time. After this the scientists made a mistaken assumption, stating that the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy was the Sun. In fact, the “heart” of the Galaxy located in its middle is a supermassive black hole, which is overwhelming in its size being three million times larger than the Sun.

These data have recently been obtained as a result of a constant 15-year long space study by scientists of the Galactic Centre and its ESO telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory. The black hole situated in The Milky way does not come close to other cosmic bodies and has unique abilities to convert matter into energy and extrude material at a speed close to the speed of light. By far there have not been detected any objects in the entire universe with such incredible properties.

The place occupied by our Sun among the stars in the Galaxy is fairly modest: it is an average one among billions of ordinary stars and it is twice farther from the centre of the Galaxy than from its edge. However, for us, the Sun will always remain the most beautiful and important star, the only one in its system, which served as a name for the whole system. The Solar System consists of eight planets, each located on its own distances, and the farther the planet from the Sun is, the longer its orbit is. Each planet has its own natural satellites, and there may be either one of them, as in the Earth’s case, for example, or ten and more, as some giant planets have. There are two exceptions to this system though – Mercury and Venus have no moons.

Our Sun is very bright and glittering, and its surface recalls a boiling gas mixture with a temperature of about 9941 °F. It consists of 74% of hydrogen, 24% of helium and the remaining 2% include a small amount of iron and nickel. In other words, the entire Solar System is composed mostly of hydrogen. Its structure, of course, includes other substances, but their percentage is only 0.1%. The Sun is heavier than all the planets, so it has a huge gravitational force that keeps the planets in their orbits.

The Earth is the third planet in The Solar System and is about 150 million miles away, while the light emitted by the Sun is still able to cover this distance in just eight minutes. The Sun mass is bigger than the Earth’s approximately 330 thousand times and larger in 109 times.

Although these numbers may seem huge to us, there exist much bigger stars than the Sun, such as Sirius, Betelgeuse and Antares, though they are incredibly far away. But their size and brightness give us a chance to distinguish them in the night sky, among other 6000 stars visible to the naked man’s eye on a clear night sky.

Size is not the only difference stars have in common. Colour is another category that varies depending on the temperature and can fluctuate from red to white or blue. The coolest stars are represented by the red colour, while the blue one is an indication of the hottest stars, which surface temperatures can rise above 12000° F.

There are also many similarities between the stars. They are all born from a cloud of cold molecular hydrogen, which is gravitationally compressed at its first stage. When the cloud is fragmented, many of its parts are generated in separate stars. Material is shaped in the form close to a ball and constantly undergoes the influence of its own gravity. Meanwhile, the temperature in its centre goes higher and higher until it runs up to the level necessary to ignite nuclear fusion.

If one bothered to collect all stars together and compare their size and structure in order to find out which ones are the most popular, the biggest group would definitely consist of red dwarfs. They have less than 50% of the mass of the Sun and can weigh even 7.5 per cent less.

Death is another common event in stars’ lives. They pass away gradually (billions of years) because of the failure of nuclear fuel. Hydrogen is converted to helium, which is concentrated in the nucleus, and helium reactions occur only on the surface of the star. The core of the star begins to cool and the stars collapse inside. Unfortunately, according to scientists, our Sun will also burn out completely in 6 billion years.

All these facts and other data about the stars and space are available to us mostly thanks to telescopes. Today, there are seven complexes that have telescopes with a mirror diameter of more than eight meters. The largest of them is located in the Atacama Large Millimeter Research Center Array in Chile. The biggest telescope in the world is made up of 66 radio telescopes with diameters from seven to twelve meters. They are all combined into a single device that has an incredible resolution and can capture objects in the depths of the early Universe, where the galaxies were formed billions of years ago.

In the nearest future, we expect to see the construction and introduction of telescope tools with a primary mirror diameter of 30 and 39 meters. So, the biggest star records are still to be set. Who knows what other secrets our Universe will tell us and whether all her secrets can be revealed at all. On the other hand, the most important thing is what we want to know and what we actually need: to disclose all mysteries, classify all-stars, systems and galaxies and mark the accurate space borders or fascinate the very process of finding out new information about how our Universe works.

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Bibliography

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• Telescopes: What Are Their Uses?
• History of the Telescope
• Next Generation: Future Giant Telescopes
• Different Types of Galaxies: Astronomy
• Spiral Galaxies Collision and Effect on the Earth
• The Mysteries of the Universe: The Galaxies
• The Origin of Galaxies: Theories Explaining
• Physics Project: Scale Model of the Milky Way Galaxy
• Telescope's Part in Astronomy
• The Milky Way and the Expanding Universe
• Liquid Lake on Mars
• The Gregorian Calendar and the Egyptian Calendar
• Humanities: Galileo and Four Moons of Jupiter
• Solar Calendar and Its Different Types
• How Close Is the Success of Suborbital Commercial Space Shuttles?

What is the universe made of?

Matter and energy are the two basic components of the entire Universe. An enormous challenge for scientists is that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible and the source of most of the energy is not understood. How can we study the Universe if we can’t see most of it?

As our tools for observation grow more sophisticated, scientists at Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian will continue to be at the forefront of dark matter and dark energy research.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes help map the distribution of dark matter in colliding galaxy clusters, like the Bullet Cluster. X-ray observations show a heated shock front where the gas from the clusters collided and slowed down, but gravitational lensing measurements show that dark matter was unaffected by the collision and separate from the normal matter.

It is theorized that when some dark matter particles collide, they annihilate and disappear in a flash of high-energy radiation. The Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) in Arizona, which can detect gamma-ray radiation, is looking for the signature of dark matter annihilation.

The South Pole Telescope in Antarctica and Chandra are placing limits on dark energy by looking for its effects on galaxy cluster evolution throughout the history of the Universe. By comparing observations of galaxy clusters with experimental models, researchers are studying how dark energy competed with gravity throughout the history of the Universe.

Scientists at CfA have led the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), analyzing millions of galaxies and charting their distribution in the Universe. The distribution has been shown to trace sound waves from the early Universe, like ripples in a pond, where some regions have higher numbers of galaxies, and others have less. Looking at these distributions, we can more accurately measure the distance to galaxies and map the effects of dark energy.

On the horizon, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will create a 3D map of the Universe, containing millions of galaxies out to 10 billion light years. This map will measure dark energy’s effect on the expansion of the Universe. And the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will observe billions of galaxies and discover unprecedented numbers of supernovae, constraining the properties of dark matter and dark energy.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Astronomer Fritz Zwicky was the first to notice the discrepancy between the amount of visible matter in a cluster of galaxies and the motions of the galaxies themselves. He suggested that there may be invisible matter, or what he called “dark matter”, interacting gravitationally with the visible matter. Later, astronomers noticed similar incongruities when observing nearby spiral galaxies. The outer edges of the galaxies rotated much faster than expected, suggesting “dark matter” existed throughout and extended beyond the visible galaxy.

Today, we can estimate the amount of dark matter in a galaxy based on how it causes light from a background source to bend. Using this “gravitational lensing” technique, we can measure the severity of that bend to get an idea of the galaxy’s mass. When the mass we calculate from the bend and the mass we can observe directly don’t agree, we know dark matter must be present.

Modern calculations say dark matter comprises about 27% of the Universe. We don’t yet know what it is, but we are searching for answers.

We have known that the Universe is expanding since the early 20th century. But recent observations of distant supernovae and other observations show that the Universe is not only expanding, but the expansion is accelerating. This astonishing discovery came as a complete surprise because the expansion of the Universe should slow down with time because of the gravitational attraction between galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The unseen repellant force required to explain this observation has been labelled “dark energy,” and current models say it makes up about 68% of the Universe.

That leaves only 5% of the Universe that is visible to us. 

Supernova 1994D in this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope might look like a star, but it's the explosion of a white dwarf that nearly outshone an entire galaxy. Such supernovas — known as type Ia — are extremely similar to each other, allowing astronomers to use them to measure the rate of the expansion of the universe.

What We Know and What We Think

While we can’t see dark matter, we know it’s there. And we can investigate some of dark matter’s properties using gravitational lensing. This technique measures the gravitational pull galaxies exert on light from more distant sources. The warping and magnification of this light gives us insight into the amount, density, and distribution of dark matter in any given lensing galaxy. Theoretically, the current best explanation we have for dark matter is the existence of WIMPs, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. These theoretical particles should have certain predictable behaviors, but directly observing them and their byproducts so far has proved elusive.

As for dark energy, Einstein had assumed the Universe was static, neither expanding nor collapsing. However, his Theory of General Relativity predicted that the Universe was not static, and so he added a “cosmological constant,” to oppose gravity. He later called it the “biggest blunder” of his life after Hubble demonstrated that the Universe was expanding.

The discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating revived the idea of the cosmological constant. The simplest interpretation of this constant is that it represents the energy of empty space. This “vacuum energy” is constant throughout space and time.

Another interpretation is that dark energy might be an energy field that varies over time and space. Or, perhaps we do not fully understand gravity. For example, maybe it acts differently on enormous scales. Astronomers are currently testing modifications to General Relativity to see if they can explain the Universe’s accelerating expansion.

• Moons and Satellites
• Neutron Stars and White Dwarfs
• Planetary Geology
• Planetary Nebulas
• Spectroscopy
• Star Clusters
• Star Formation
• Starburst Galaxies
• Stellar Structure and Evolution
• Supernovas & Remnants
• Variable Stars and Binaries
• Astrochemistry
• Atomic & Molecular Data
• Cosmic Microwave Background
• Dark Energy and Dark Matter
• Elemental Abundances
• Laboratory Astrophysics
• Stellar Astronomy
• Atomic and Molecular Physics
• Optical and Infrared Astronomy
• Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences
• Theoretical Astrophysics

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A Smithsonian magazine special report

What Is the Universe? Real Physics Has Some Mind-Bending Answers

Science says the universe could be a hologram, a computer program, a black hole or a bubble—and there are ways to check

Victoria Jaggard

The questions are as big as the universe and (almost) as old as time: Where did I come from, and why am I here? That may sound like a query for a philosopher, but if you crave a more scientific response, try asking a cosmologist.

This branch of physics is hard at work trying to decode the nature of reality by matching mathematical theories with a bevy of evidence. Today most cosmologists think that the universe was created during the big bang about 13.8 billion years ago, and it is expanding at an ever-increasing rate . The cosmos is woven into a fabric we call space-time, which is embroidered with a cosmic web of brilliant galaxies and invisible dark matter .

It sounds a little strange, but piles of pictures, experimental data and models compiled over decades can back up this description. And as new information gets added to the picture, cosmologists are considering even wilder ways to describe the universe—including some outlandish proposals that are nevertheless rooted in solid science:

The universe is a hologram

Look at a standard hologram, printed on a 2D surface, and you’ll see a 3D projection of the image. Decrease the size of the individual dots that make up the image, and the hologram gets sharper. In the 1990s, physicists realized that something like this could be happening with our universe.

Classical physics describes the fabric of space-time as a four-dimensional structure, with three dimensions of space and one of time. Einstein’s theory of general relativity says that, at its most basic level, this fabric should be smooth and continuous. But that was before quantum mechanics leapt onto the scene. While relativity is great at describing the universe on visible scales, quantum physics tells us all about the way things work on the level of atoms and subatomic particles. According to quantum theories, if you examine the fabric of space-time close enough, it should be made of teeny-tiny grains of information, each a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton.

Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind and Nobel prize winner Gerard ‘t Hooft have each presented calculations showing what happens when you try to combine quantum and relativistic descriptions of space-time. They found that, mathematically speaking, the fabric should be a 2D surface, and the grains should act like the dots in a vast cosmic image, defining the “resolution” of our 3D universe. Quantum mechanics also tells us that these grains should experience random jitters that might occasionally blur the projection and thus be detectable. Last month, physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory started collecting data with a highly sensitive arrangement of lasers and mirrors called the Holometer . This instrument is finely tuned to pick up miniscule motion in space-time and reveal whether it is in fact grainy at the smallest scale. The experiment should gather data for at least a year, so we may know soon enough if we’re living in a hologram.

The universe is a computer simulation

Just like the plot of the Matrix , you may be living in a highly advanced computer program and not even know it. Some version of this thinking has been debated since long before Keanu uttered his first “whoa”. Plato wondered if the world as we perceive it is an illusion , and modern mathematicians grapple with the reason math is universal—why is it that no matter when or where you look, 2 + 2 must always equal 4? Maybe because that is a fundamental part of the way the universe was coded.

In 2012, physicists at the University of Washington in Seattle said that if we do live in a digital simulation, there might be a way to find out . Standard computer models are based on a 3D grid, and sometimes the grid itself generates specific anomalies in the data. If the universe is a vast grid, the motions and distributions of high-energy particles called cosmic rays may reveal similar anomalies—a glitch in the Matrix—and give us a peek at the grid’s structure. A 2013 paper by MIT engineer Seth Lloyd  builds the case for an intriguing spin on the concept: If space-time is made of quantum bits, the universe must be one giant quantum computer . Of course, both notions raise a troubling quandary: If the universe is a computer program, who or what wrote the code?

The universe is a black hole

Any “Astronomy 101”  book  will tell you that the universe burst into being during the big bang. But what existed  before  that point, and what triggered the explosion? A  2010 paper by Nikodem Poplawski , then at Indiana University, made the case that our universe was forged inside a really big  black hole .

While  Stephen Hawking  keeps changing his mind, the popular definition of a black hole is a region of space-time so dense that, past a certain point, nothing can escape its gravitational pull. Black holes are born when dense packets of matter collapse in on themselves, such as during the deaths of especially hefty stars. Some versions of the equations that describe black holes go on to say that the compressed matter does not fully collapse into a point—or singularity—but instead bounces back, spewing out hot, scrambled matter.

Poplawski crunched the numbers and found that observations of the shape and composition of the universe match the mathematical picture of a black hole being born. The initial collapse would equal the big bang, and everything in and around us would be made from the cooled, rearranged components of that scrambled matter. Even better, the theory suggests that all the black holes in our universe may themselves be the gateways to alternate realities. So how do we test it? This model is based on black holes that spin, because that rotation is part of what prevents the original matter from fully collapsing. Poplawski says we should be able to see an echo of the spin inherited from our “parent” black hole in surveys of galaxies, with vast clusters moving in a slight, but potentially detectable, preferred direction.

The universe is a bubble in an ocean of universes

Another cosmic puzzle comes up when you consider what happened in the first slivers of a second after the big bang. Maps of relic light emitted shortly after the universe was born tell us that baby space-time grew exponentially in the blink of an eye before settling into a more sedate rate of expansion. This process, called inflation, is pretty popular among cosmologists, and it got a further boost this year with the potential (but still unconfirmed)  discovery of ripples in space-time called gravitational waves , which would have been products of the rapid growth spurt.

If inflation is confirmed, some theorists would argue that we must live in a frothy sea of multiple universes. Some of the  earliest models of inflation  say that before the big bang, space-time contained what’s known as a false vacuum, a high-energy field devoid of matter and radiation that is inherently unstable. To reach a stable state, the vacuum began to bubble like a pot of boiling water. With each bubble, a new universe was born, giving rise to an  endless multiverse .

The trouble with testing this idea is that the cosmos is ridiculously huge—the observable universe stretches for about 46 billion light years in all directions—and even our best telescopes can’t hope to peer at the surface of a bubble this big. One option, then, is to look for any evidence of our bubble universe colliding with another. Today our best maps of the big bang’s relic light do show an  unusual cold spot in the sky  that could be a “bruise” from bumping into a cosmic neighbor. Or it could be a statistical fluke. So a team of researchers led by Carroll Wainwright at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been running computer models to figure out what  other sorts of traces  a bubbly collision would leave in the big bang’s echo.

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Victoria Jaggard | | READ MORE

Victoria Jaggard is the science editor for Smithsonian.com. Her writing has appeared in Chemical & Engineering News , National Geographic , New Scientist and elsewhere.

Cosmic History

The Universe’s History

The origin, evolution, and nature of the universe have fascinated and confounded humankind for centuries. New ideas and major discoveries made during the 20th century transformed cosmology – the term for the way we conceptualize and study the universe – although much remains unknown. Here is the history of the universe according to cosmologists’ current theories.

Cosmic Inflation

Around 13.8 billion years ago, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light for a fraction of a second, a period called cosmic inflation. Scientists aren’t sure what came before inflation or what powered it. It’s possible that energy during this period was just part of the fabric of space-time. Cosmologists think inflation explains many aspects of the universe we observe today, like its flatness, or lack of curvature, on the largest scales. Inflation may have also magnified density differences that naturally occur on space’s smallest, quantum-level scales, which eventually helped form the universe’s large-scale structures.

Big Bang and Nucleosynthesis

When cosmic inflation stopped, the energy driving it transferred to matter and light – the big bang. One second after the big bang, the universe consisted of an extremely hot (18 billion degrees Fahrenheit or 10 billion degrees Celsius) primordial soup of light and particles. In the following minutes, an era called nucleosynthesis, protons and neutrons collided and produced the earliest elements – hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium and beryllium. After five minutes, most of today’s helium had formed, and the universe had expanded and cooled enough that further element formation stopped. At this point, though, the universe was still too hot for the atomic nuclei of these elements to catch electrons and form complete atoms. The cosmos was opaque because a vast number of electrons created a sort of fog that scattered light.

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Lunar Crater Radio Telescope: Illuminating the Cosmic Dark Ages

Roman Space Telescope Could Image 100 Hubble Ultra Deep Fields at Once

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope to Uncover Echoes of the Universe’s Creation

Recombination

Around 380,000 years after the big bang, the universe had cooled enough that atomic nuclei could capture electrons, a period astronomers call the epoch of recombination. This had two major effects on the cosmos. First, with most electrons now bound into atoms, there were no longer enough free ones to completely scatter light, and the cosmic fog cleared. The universe became transparent, and for the first time, light could freely travel over great distances. Second, the formation of these first atoms produced its own light. This glow, still detectable today, is called the cosmic microwave background. It is the oldest light we can observe in the universe.

After the cosmic microwave background, the universe again became opaque at shorter wavelengths due to the absorbing effects of all those hydrogen atoms. For the next 200 million years the universe remained dark. There were no stars to shine. The cosmos at this point consisted of a sea of hydrogen atoms, helium, and trace amounts of heavier elements.

First Stars

Gas was not uniformly distributed throughout the universe. Cooler areas of space were lumpier, with denser clouds of gas. As these clumps grew more massive, their gravity attracted additional matter. As they became denser, and more compact, the centers of these clumps became hotter – hot enough eventually that nuclear fusion occurred in their centers. These were the first stars. They were 30 to 300 times more massive than our Sun and millions of times brighter. Over several hundred million years, the first stars collected into the first galaxies.

Reionization

At first, starlight couldn’t travel far because it was scattered by the relatively dense gas surrounding the first stars. Gradually, the ultraviolet light emitted by these stars broke down, or ionized, hydrogen atoms in the gas into their constituent electrons and protons. As this reionization progressed, starlight traveled farther, breaking up more and more hydrogen atoms. By the time the universe was 1 billion years old, stars and galaxies had transformed nearly all this gas, making the universe transparent to light as we see it today.

For many years, scientists thought the universe’s current expansion was slowing down. But in fact, cosmic expansion is speeding up. In 1998, astronomers found that certain supernovae, bright stellar explosions, were fainter than expected. They concluded this could only happen if the supernovae had moved farther away, at a faster rate than predicted.

Scientists suspect a mysterious substance they call dark energy is accelerating expansion. Future research may yield new surprises, but cosmologists suggest it’s likely the universe will continue to expand forever.

Discover More Topics From NASA

Dark Matter & Dark Energy

The Big Bang

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13.7 Cosmos & Culture

Evaluating our importance in the universe.

Marcelo Gleiser

ESA astronaut Tim Peake posted this Jan. 29 photo on his social media channels, commenting: "Beautiful night pass over Italy, Alps and Mediterranean." ESA/NASA hide caption

ESA astronaut Tim Peake posted this Jan. 29 photo on his social media channels, commenting: "Beautiful night pass over Italy, Alps and Mediterranean."

For the past two weeks we've been exploring some of the questions related to life's origin on Earth and possibly elsewhere.

We know life was present on Earth at least 3.5 billion years ago. It may have been present even earlier, but results remain controversial. The window of opportunity for life to emerge and take root here opened after the Late Heavy Bombardment calmed down some 3.9 billion years ago. Before then, conditions were too harsh for living creatures to survive; if anything lived, it was most probably destroyed, leaving no clues. Life's early history is written in rocks. As primal rocks melted and got mixed and remixed in a churning inferno, life's early experiments were erased into oblivion.

We can't know what really happened to life that early on. We can study possible metabolic and genetic pathways to life, collect fossilized evidence from old rocks, and conduct experiments in the laboratory, expanding our understanding of this most vexing of questions, the transition from nonlife to life. But even if we are able to make life in vitro , we can't be sure that this is what happened around 3.6 billion years ago here.

What we do know is that the history of life in a planet depends on the planet's life history: change the sequence or intensity of events — asteroid collisions, massive volcanic eruptions, radical changes in atmospheric composition — and life's history is rewritten.

This casts the question of life here, and elsewhere, into new focus. We can state, with high confidence, that even if there are other intelligent creatures in the universe, even humanoid ones, they won't be like us. We are the only humans in the cosmos, the product of a very particular set of cosmic, geochemical and evolutionary circumstances. Life is an experiment in natural selection, and an amazingly creative one at that. There may be certain biological patterns that offer an evolutionary advantage and would be fairly common, such as two eyes or left-right body symmetry. But details will vary as they do with snowflakes, all coming from the same chemistry but amazingly diverse due to environmental details.

As we study the history of life on Earth, we also learn that for approximately 3 billion of the 3.5 billion years it has been around, it consisted of single-celled organisms. The explosive diversity of life we witness now is a recent phenomenon, at least in geological time. To go from nonliving to living chemistry, and then from single-celled to multicellular organisms, such as sponges, many extremely complex steps had to be undertaken. To go from multicellular organisms to dinosaurs and then to mammals and eventually to primates took more complex steps, all resulting from random mutations and selective pressure, all unique and unreproducible.

Life should exist elsewhere but, if it does, the probability is that it will be simple, some kind of alien bacteria. Intelligent aliens may be out there in Earth-like planets, or in more exotic environments, but if they are, they are very far away. For all practical purposes, we are alone as intelligent molecular machines capable of pondering our origins and future.

This is the striking revelation from modern science, one that should grab everyone's attention. We matter because we are rare and our planet matters because it is unique. At the very least, it should inspire us to re-evaluate our relationship to one another and to the planet, beyond petty ideologies and short-sighted tribal disputes that fill so much of our time.

Next time you hear a scientist saying something like "the more we know about the universe the less important we become," beg to differ. The reality is precisely the opposite: The more we know about the universe, the more unique we become. What we do with this knowledge is, of course, a personal choice for each of us. To have this choice is the privilege of being human.

Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist — and professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the co-founder of 13.7, a prolific author of papers and essays, and active promoter of science to the general public. His latest book is The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning . You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser .

• origin of life

Stargazing into the Future: Top Astronomy Research Topics

Table of contents

• 1 Astrophysical Magnetism and the Interstellar Medium: Astronomy Research Topics
• 2 Black Holes: Unveiling the Dark Mysteries of the Cosmos
• 3 Cosmic Microwave Background: Echoes of the Big Bang
• 4 Dark Energy and Matter
• 5 First Stars, Exoplanets, and Galaxies
• 6 Galaxy Clusters and Formation
• 7 Gravitational Lensing
• 8 Neutron Stars and Pulsars
• 9 Optical Surveys
• 10 Solar Physics
• 11 Exploring the Cosmic Frontier: Key Insights Unveiled

Welcome to the fascinating universe of astrophysics with our comprehensive article that illuminates the mysteries and marvels of space. Embark on an extraordinary voyage through the cosmos as we unravel the secrets of the universe in this captivating exploration of astrophysics.

Our article explores ten key astronomy research topics, each offering a gateway to understanding the complex phenomena that govern the stars, planets, and galaxies, inviting readers to dive deep into the wonders of space. Gain insights into the complex forces shaping the cosmos, from the smallest particles to the largest structures.

Continue reading to unlock the secrets of the universe and fuel your curiosity about the wonders beyond our planet.

Astrophysical Magnetism and the Interstellar Medium: Astronomy Research Topics

Astrophysical magnetism and the interstellar medium represents a cutting-edge field of astronomy focused on understanding the magnetic forces at play within the cosmos and the matter that fills the space between the stars. This field examines magnetic influences on star and galaxy formation, cosmic ray behavior, and interstellar cloud dynamics, integrating observation, theory, and modeling to understand the universe’s magnetic aspects.

• Investigating magnetic fields’ role in the interstellar medium and star birth.
• Charting Cosmic Magnetism: Space Topics for Project.
• Space Research Topics about Astrophysical Plasma Processes.
• Astronomy Essay Topics about Magnetic Fields in Galaxy Evolution: Astronomy Essay Topics.
• Interesting Topics in Astronomy about Magnetars.
• Astronomy Topics to Write About Magnetic Reconnection Events.
• Cosmic Rays’ Journey Through Magnetic Fields.
• Astronomy Research Questions in Detecting Cosmic Magnetism.
• Crucial role of Molecular Clouds and Magnetism in star-forming regions and the lifecycle of stars.
• The impact of magnetism on the gas and dust between stars.

Black Holes: Unveiling the Dark Mysteries of the Cosmos

Black holes represent one of the most fascinating subjects in the field of astrophysics, captivating scientists and the public alike with their enigmatic nature and the extreme physics surrounding them. This area of study delves into the formation, evolution, and effects of these cosmic phenomena, exploring how they warp spacetime, influence their surroundings, and provide key insights into the workings of the universe.

• The Event Horizon Telescope’s View of Sagittarius A.
• Hawking Radiation: Unraveling Black Hole Mysteries.
• Black Hole Binaries and Gravitational Wave Emissions.
• Accretion Disks and High-Energy Astrophysics.
• Primordial Black Holes and the Early Universe.
• The Information Paradox: Debating Black Hole Mysteries.
• Interstellar Black Holes: Navigating the Invisible.
• Supermassive Black Holes and Galaxy Formation.
• Visualizing Black Holes: Simulation and Interpretation.
• Quasars and Active Galactic Nuclei: Black Holes in Action.

Cosmic Microwave Background: Echoes of the Big Bang

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a relic radiation that offers a snapshot of the universe just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, serving as a cornerstone for cosmology. Researchers study the CMB to understand the early universe’s conditions, the formation of cosmic structures, and the fundamental parameters that define our cosmos.

• Mapping the Universe’s Baby Picture.
• The Polarization of the CMB.
• Anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background.
• CMB and the Hubble Tension.
• Cosmic Neutrinos and the CMB.
• Dark Matter Imprints on the CMB.
• The Search for B-Mode Polarization.
• Planck Satellite Discoveries.
• The CMB’s Role in Large-Scale Structure Formation.
• Future Missions to Study the CMB.

Dark Energy and Matter

Exploring the enigmatic components of the cosmos that do not emit, absorb, or reflect light, dark energy and dark matter remain some of the most profound mysteries in astrophysics. Dark energy, a force that accelerates the expansion of the universe, and dark matter, an unseen substance that holds galaxies together, together comprise most of the universe’s mass-energy content. Research in this area aims to unravel their nature through theoretical models and observational evidence.

• Mapping the Invisible: Tracking Dark Matter in the Cosmos.
• The Accelerating Universe: Unveiling the Nature of Dark Energy.
• Cosmic Clues: The Role of Dark Matter in Galaxy Formation.
• Einstein’s Cosmological Constant and the Mystery of Dark Energy: Research Topics About Space.
• Gravitational Lensing: Astronomy Topics to Research a Window into Dark Matter.
• The Dark Sector: Interactions Between Dark Matter and Dark Energy: Topics About Astronomy.
•  Astronomy Topics for Research Paper about Neutrinos and the Dark Universe: Tracing Invisible Particles.
• The Cosmic Microwave Background: Insights into Dark Matter and Energy: Interesting Astronomy Topics.
• Astronomy Research Paper Topics about Galactic Rotation Curves: The Dark Matter Evidence.
• Space Exploration Topics about Future Observatories and the Quest for Dark Matter.

First Stars, Exoplanets, and Galaxies

This field examines the origins and early evolution of the universe’s first stars, the formation and characteristics of exoplanets, and the development of galaxies. These topics cover a broad spectrum from the cosmic dawn, when the first stars ignited, through the assembly of galaxies, to the current era where telescopes search for planets around distant stars, offering insights into the processes that shaped the cosmos.

• Dawn of the Cosmos: The Life and Death of the First Stars.
• Hunting for Other Worlds: Discovering New Exoplanets.
• The Assembly of Galaxies: Insights from Deep Space Observations.
• Chemical Signatures: Tracing Galaxy Evolution Through Spectroscopy.
• Astrophysics Research topics about the Role of Dark Matter in Shaping Early Galaxies.
• Star Formation Rates and the Growth of Galaxies.
• Detecting the Atmospheres of Distant Exoplanets.
• Population III Stars: Unlocking the Secrets of the Universe’s First Lights.
• The Search for Life: Targeting Earth-like Exoplanets.
• Galactic Nuclei and the Seeds of Supermassive Black Holes.

Galaxy Clusters and Formation

Galaxy clusters, the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe, serve as excellent laboratories for studying the formation of cosmic structures, the behavior of dark matter, and the thermodynamics of the intergalactic medium. This area of research not only sheds light on the cluster formation and evolution but also on the larger-scale structure of the universe and the fundamental laws that govern it.

• Space Topics to Research The Gravitational Architecture: Mapping Galaxy Clusters.
• Dark Matter Skeletons: The Structure of Cosmic Webs.
• Hot Gas and Galactic Giants: The Intracluster Medium.
• Colliding Titans: Studying Galaxy Cluster Mergers.
• The Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect: CMB Shadows.
• Lensing Mass: Weighing Galaxy Clusters.
• Star Formation in Extreme Environments.
• The Butcher-Oemler Effect: Evolution of Galaxies in Clusters.
• Feedback Processes in Galaxy Cluster Cores.
• Cosmology with Galaxy Clusters: Understanding the Universe’s Expansion.

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Gravitational Lensing

Gravitational lensing, the bending of light by massive objects, acts as a natural telescope, magnifying distant galaxies, revealing objects otherwise too faint to see, and providing a unique tool for testing theories of gravity and the nature of dark matter. Studies in gravitational lensing span from observing the most distant galaxies to understanding the distribution of dark matter in the universe.

• Einstein’s Lens: Confirming General Relativity.
• Cosmic Magnification: Discovering the Distant Universe.
• Hunting Dark Matter Through Lensing Anomalies.
• Microlensing: Revealing Rogue Planets and Dark Objects.
• Strong Lensing: Arcs and Rings in the Sky.
• Weak Lensing: Mapping the Dark Universe.
• Lensing and Cosmic Shear: Observing the Shape of the Universe.
• Time-Delay Cosmography: Measuring the Universe’s Expansion.
• Galaxy Evolution Through the Lens.
• The Future of Lensing: New Frontiers with Next-Generation Telescopes.

Neutron Stars and Pulsars

Neutron stars and pulsars present extreme states of matter, with densities exceeding that of atomic nuclei. These objects provide insight into the physics of the cosmos, from the nuclear reactions in their interiors to the powerful magnetic fields that drive pulsar emissions. Research in this area explores the aftermath of supernovae, the nature of dense matter, and the fundamental principles of physics under extreme conditions.

• Birth from Catastrophe: The Creation of Neutron Stars.
• Pulsars: Lighthouses of the Cosmos.
• The Extreme Physics of Magnetars.
• Binary Pulsars and Tests of General Relativity.
• The Internal Composition of Neutron Stars.
• Gravitational Waves from Neutron Star Mergers.
• Pulsar Timing Arrays: Probing the Cosmic Web.
• Fast Radio Bursts and Neutron Star Mysteries.
• Neutron Star Cooling and Nuclear Physics.
• The Search for Isolated Neutron Stars.

Optical Surveys

Optical surveys have revolutionized our understanding of the universe, from mapping the distribution of galaxies and dark matter to discovering transient cosmic events. These large-scale observations provide a comprehensive view of the sky, enabling the discovery of new celestial phenomena and offering insights into the structure and evolution of the cosmos.

• The Legacy of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
• Transients in the Night: Catching Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts.
• Mapping the Milky Way: Gaia’s Billion-Star Survey.
• The Dark Energy Survey: Unraveling Cosmic Acceleration.
• Pan-STARRS: A Panoramic View of the Sky.
• The Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the LSST Project.
• Hunting for Minor Planets: Optical Surveys in the Solar System.
• The Zooniverse: Citizen Science and the Cosmos.
• The Future of Sky Surveys: AI and the Next Decade.
• Ultra-Deep Fields: Peering into the Cosmic Dawn.

Solar Physics

Solar physics focuses on understanding the Sun, from its core to the outer layers of the solar atmosphere, and its influence on the solar system. This research is crucial for predicting solar activity, understanding the mechanisms behind solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and their impact on space weather, which can affect Earth’s technological systems.

• The Solar Dynamo: Driving the Sun’s Magnetic Cycle.
• Coronal Mass Ejections: Impact on Earth’s Space Environment.
• Solar Flares: Unraveling the Mechanisms of Solar Storms.
• Helioseismology: Probing the Sun’s Interior.
• The Solar Wind: Understanding Its Origins and Variability.
• Sunspots and Solar Activity: Patterns and Predictions.
• The Parker Solar Probe: Touching the Sun.
• Solar-Terrestrial Relations: The Impact of the Sun on Earth.
• The Chromosphere and Corona: Observing the Sun’s Outer Layers.
• Advances in Solar Observation Technologies.

Exploring the Cosmic Frontier: Key Insights Unveiled

This article takes us on a profound journey through the universe’s mysteries, from the warping effects of gravitational lensing to the extreme environments of neutron stars and pulsars. Key takeaways include the significant role of gravitational phenomena in understanding cosmic structure, the critical insights provided by the study of the universe’s densest objects, and how these studies illuminate the dark corners of our universe. By delving into these topics, we gain a deeper appreciation for the intricate tapestry of the cosmos and the fundamental principles that govern its vast expanse.

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Essay on Our Universe

Students are often asked to write an essay on Our Universe in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Our Universe

What is the universe.

The universe is a vast space that holds everything we know – from tiny atoms to giant galaxies. It includes all of space, time, energy, and matter. Imagine it as a huge home where all the stars, planets, and moons live. It’s so big that we can’t see the end of it, and it’s always expanding.

Stars and Galaxies

Stars are like giant balls of gas that give off light and heat. They group together to form galaxies. Our sun is a star, and it’s part of a galaxy we call the Milky Way. There are billions of galaxies each with its own stars.

Planets and Moons

Planets are big objects that orbit, or go around, a star. Earth is a planet that goes around our sun. Some planets have moons, which are smaller objects that orbit planets. Just like Earth has one moon, other planets can have many.

The Mystery of Space

Space is full of mysteries. Scientists use telescopes to study far-away stars and planets. They’re trying to learn more about black holes, which are places in space where gravity is very strong, and about the possibility of life beyond Earth.

250 Words Essay on Our Universe

The universe is everything we can touch, feel, sense, measure, or detect. It includes living things, planets, stars, galaxies, dust clouds, light, and even time. Before the birth of the Universe, time, space, and matter did not exist.

The Big Bang

The universe began with a huge explosion called the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago. This explosion made all the space, time, matter, and energy in the universe. It started very small and hot, then cooled and stretched to become as big as it is now, and it’s still expanding.

Stars are huge balls of hot gas that give off light and heat. Our sun is a star. There are billions of stars in the universe. Stars group together to form galaxies. Our galaxy is called the Milky Way, and it has billions of stars too. There are so many galaxies we can’t count them all.

Planets are big objects that orbit, or go around, stars. Our Earth is a planet. Some planets have moons that orbit them. Moons are smaller than planets and there are hundreds of moons in our universe.

Exploring the Universe

Scientists use telescopes to look at stars, planets, and galaxies. They use space probes to explore things too far to see with telescopes. By studying the universe, we learn more about where we come from and our place in the cosmos.

500 Words Essay on Our Universe

Introduction to the universe.

The universe is like a huge home with many rooms, each filled with stars, planets, and all sorts of interesting things. Imagine looking up at the night sky. Every star you see is part of our universe. It is everything that exists, from the smallest ant to the biggest galaxy.

What’s in the Universe?

Our universe has lots of galaxies, and our home galaxy is called the Milky Way. Inside it, there’s our solar system, where Earth is just one of eight planets. Besides planets, there are moons, comets, asteroids, and stars. Stars are like giant balls of gas that are so hot they glow and give off light.

The Size of Our Universe

Think of the biggest thing you’ve ever seen. Now imagine something a million times bigger. Our universe is even larger than that! It’s so big that we measure how far things are in it with a special word: “light-year.” A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, and light is super fast!

The Beginning of Everything

A long time ago, scientists believe the universe started with a big bang. It wasn’t an explosion, but more like everything, all the space, time, and stuff that would become galaxies, started expanding from a tiny point. Since then, the universe has been getting bigger and bigger.

The Life of Stars

Stars are born, live, and then die, just like living things on Earth, but their life lasts millions or even billions of years. They start in places called “nebulae,” which are clouds of gas and dust. When they die, they can explode in a huge burst called a supernova, or they can shrink and become really dense, like a “black hole.”

Humans have always been curious about the stars. We’ve used telescopes to look far away, and we’ve sent spacecraft to explore planets and moons. Some spacecraft, like the Voyager probes, have even left our solar system and are sending back information from beyond.

The Mystery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy

There are things in the universe we can’t see called dark matter and dark energy. We know they’re there because they affect how galaxies move and how the universe is growing. But what they are exactly is still a big question.

Our Place in the Universe

Even though the universe is so vast, our Earth is just a tiny part of it. But it’s a special part because it’s where we live, and so far, it’s the only place we know that has life. We are still learning so much about the universe and our place in it.

Our universe is a fascinating and mysterious place. It’s full of wonders that we are just beginning to understand. As we continue to look up at the stars and learn more, we realize how amazing it is that we are a part of something so vast and incredible. The universe is the biggest adventure waiting for us to explore.

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Universe: essay on our universe | geography.

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Here is an essay on ‘ Our Universe’ for class 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. Find paragraphs, long and short essays on ‘Our Universe’ especially written for school and college students.

Essay on Our Universe

Our Universe contains 176 billion (one billion = 100 crores) constellations (group of stars) and each constellation includes hundreds of billion stars. Universe consists, constellation, in which Sun exists, is so big that from the core of constellation, light takes around 27 thousand years to reach up to sun. The solar system which is part of Milky Way galaxy is in disc-shaped spiral form.

Essay # 1. Sun:

Sun rotates round its axis from West to East. About 99.85% mass of solar system lies with sun only whereas planets constitute – 0.135%, comets – 0.01%, satellites – 0.00005%, dwarf planets – 0.000002%, shooting stars – 0.0000001% and inter planetary medium consists of 0.0000001% of the rest of mass.

Sun is not stationery and completes one rotation round its own axis in 25 days. One rotation of sun takes 25 days (of Earth) if observed from the equator while if we observe it from its poles, each rotation of sun takes 36 days. The rotation of sun was observed by Galileo first of all.

Sun is source of light, heat, energy and life on our Earth. Normally looking pale, this spherical ball of fire has 13 lakh multiples more volume than that of Earth and 3.25 lakh times more weight. Pressure of gaseous material on its centre is 200 billion multiples more than the pressure of air, Earth experiences while density of gases is 150 times more than that of water. Temperature of sun is 50 lakh degrees Kelvin (one Kelvin is equal to one degree on Celsius scale).

Hydrogen in form of Plasma turns into Helium at this temperature. This fusion gives birth to energy. The quantum of such produced energy may be imagined from the fact that fusion produced energy in one second is more than as much mankind has used on Earth till date. This fusion is continuous process on the surface of Sun.

Gravity of Sun is 28 times more than that of earth and black spots visible on sun are actually very powerful magnetic regions. Each magnetic regions of sun is more than 10 thousand times more powerful than magnetic power of Earth. Actual size of each black spot may be lakhs of square kilometers. Temperature at photosphere of sun is only 6000° Kelvin while ends of chromospheres experience it 10 thousand degree.

At corona this temperature varies from 10 lakh Kelvin to 50 lakh Kelvin. Continuous winds blow at the surface of sun at speed of 800 to 900 kilometer per second and these may prove dangerous for Earth at times. These winds have their fatal effect on Ionosphere. Solar storms disturb communication system on Earth. Many a times, power grids get destroyed or seized because of disturbance at the surface of Sun.

Optical telescope at Udaipur and Kodyekanal along with Radio telescope at Pune keep continuous watch over happenings related to Sun.

Essay # 2. Planets:

Planet is a Greek word which means, Wanderer. All the planets are spherical and are total eight in number.

We can group these planets in two, that is:­

a. Inner Planets:

Inner planets are those planets which are nearer to sun as compared to others. Secondly their relief constitution includes rocks and metals. These planets are known as terrestrial planets also. Namely these planets are; Mercury, Venus, Earth & Mars.

b. Outer Planets:

Outer planets are beyond asteroids and are constituted of gases, popularly known as Gas Giants. These are; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The planets do not have any light of their own but these illuminate by reflecting sunlight and are visible at night. In the sequence of their distance from sun, these may be retented from initial alphabets of words in this sentence; My Very Efficient Mother Just Served Us Nuts.

i. Mercury:

This planet is not only smallest one but also lies closest to Sun. It does not have atmosphere of its own and is engulfed by blasts taking place because of Sun. Its core is made of iron and has this part larger than crust.

It is presumed that this crust reduced due to some comet accident. Mercury lies some 579 million (57crore 90 lakh) kilometer away from Sun and its average temperature varies between 420°C during day to -180°C at night.

It completes its revolution around Sun in 88 days while takes 58 days and 16 hours to complete its one rotation on its axis. Galileo founded Mercury in 1631 which has no satellite.

This is a rocky celestial body like Earth and second planet if counted serial vise from Sun. It completes its revolution round sun is 224.7 days while takes 243 long days to complete its rotation round its own axis from East to West.

All the other planets rotate around their axis from West to East. This hottest planet is second most glittering celestial body, first being the Moon. Also known as sister planet of Earth, Venus resembles to it in shape, size and gravity.

It has a number of volcanoes just like Earth and its surface has been formed because of volcanic eruptions. Its atmosphere consists of Carbon dioxide (96.5%) and Nitrogen. That is why it is called ‘Veiled planet’ also. Venus lies nearly 1082 million kilometers away from Sun.

iii. Earth:

Our mother planet’s name has not been derived from Greek or Roman language but from old English and Germanic. According to International Astronomical Union (IAU) biggest among Inner planets, Earth is only planet which has Geological activity taking place in its core.

Its atmosphere is also quite different to that of other planets as it consists of 77% Nitrogen and 21% Oxygen which gives it a name of ‘blue planet’. Earth is only planet where life exists. Situated nearly 14.96 crore kilometers away from sun.

The earth completes a rotation round its axis in 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds (approximately 24 hours) while to revolve around the sun, it takes 365 days 5 hours and 48 minutes. It has a satellite named Moon.

Known as the Red Planet, Mars is fourth planet of our solar system as counted from Sun. Its soil has very rich iron content and because of Ferrus content it looks red. As far its rotation on axis is concerned, it has similarity with Earth and it supports various seasons also.

Mars is a cold planet which has thin atmosphere. Its one rotation on its axis is completed in 24 hours, 37 minutes and 23 seconds while its revolution against sun takes 687 days. Having two satellites, Mars is placed around 2279 lakh kilometer away from sun.

The success of India to plant its Orbiter in orbit of Mars in its just first attempt has made it a pioneer and an exceptional one. Mars is only planet other than Earth which has ice-caps on its poles which have been named as Planum Boreum (North Pole) and Planum Australe (South Pole) or Southern Cap. The spacecraft that reached in the orbit of Mars is named 440 Newton Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM).

v. Jupiter:

First beyond the Asteroids, Jupiter is fifth planet of our solar system and is the biggest planet. This planet is one of the Gas Giants and has 1280 kilometer wide atmosphere composed of gases like Methane, Ammonia, Hydrogen and Helium.

It revolves around the sun in anti-clockwise direction and completes one revolution in 12 years. Its rotation on its axis is very fast and completes one in just 10 hours causing severely blowing winds.

These winds look like multi-coloured cloud belts. Jupiter is tilted on its axis at 3.1° and has more than 60 satellites. Most of the satellites are unknown for mankind as far information about them is concerned.

vi. Saturn:

The sixth from sun and second largest planet in solar system is Saturn. Situated some 1,431 million kilometers (More than 143 crore km) away from Sun, it is constituted of iron and nickel principally. Completing its rotation on its axis in 10 hours and 41 minutes, it makes one revolution around Sun in 29.5 years.

Its swift rotation gives rise to winds at the speed of 1800 kilometers per hour. Speed of winds on Saturn is higher than that on Jupiter but lesser than that on Neptune. There are nine rings around Saturn which from three arcs around it. These rings are made of frozen ice and rocks. It has around 62 satellites and biggest among them is Titan which is almost double the size of Moon. The atmosphere of Titan is thicker than that of Earth.

vii. Uranus:

This is seventh planet of our Solar System and third largest planet. Its size is 63 multiples bigger than earth but in weight it is only 14.5 multiples than that of Earth. Constituted of gases, Uranus has coldest atmosphere as compared to all the planets and has an average temperature of 223°C. Many layers of clouds are found on Uranus.

Higher cloud formation consists of Methane gas while lower formation consists of water. Speed of winds on this planet is 250 meters per second while it is tilted at 97.77° on its axis. Revolving round sun in anti-clockwise direction, it completes one revolution in 84 years while for completing one rotation around its axis, it takes 10 hours and 48 minutes.

viii. Neptune:

Neptune resembles to Uranus as seen in the Solar System. But it is smaller than Uranus and its surface is more condense. Presence of Methane gas makes it look green. Winds blow at speed of 2100 kilometers per hour in the atmosphere of this planet.

The planet consists of around 900 full circles and various incomplete arcs. Situated approximately 4,498 million kilometer away from Sun, it completes one rotation its axis in 16 hours and a revolution around sun in 164.8 years. Neptune has 13 satellites while Triton and Neried are two main satellites.

There are various dwarf planets in our solar system, out of which only five have been recognised.

1. Pluto (Earlier know as ninth planet, was declared dwarf in August, 2006)

4. Make make

Essay # 3. Satellites:

Satellites are of two types, manmade and natural. Satellites are actually celestial objects that revolve around some other celestial object. Natural satellites rotate on their axis also. They neither have atmosphere nor light of their own but due to reflection of sunlight, they look illuminated.

Manmade satellites are made of aluminium or plastic and are hardened with help of carbonic sheets. They travel at the speed which is 10 to 30 multiples more than that of an aircraft. Humankind has been benefitted extremely by manmade satellites in fields of telecommunications, weather forecasting, geological activities and atmospheric activities among other fields. India fired its first satellite named Arya Bhatt in 1975 and since then, we have sent more than 75 satellites into the orbit.

Moon is natural satellite of our Earth. It is around 3,84,403 kilometers away from Earth and takes 27.3 days to complete its revolution around Earth. As yet mankind has touched only this celestial body i.e. Moon on 21st July 1969. Atmosphere of Moon is so thin that it weighs only 104 kilograms and gravity is only one sixth part of the gravity of Earth.

Essay # 4. Asteroids or Planetoids:

These are too smaller than planets of Solar System but bigger than Asteroids. These celestial bodies revolve round the sun in anti-clockwise direction. These rocky bodies are numerous and most of these are concentrated between Mars and Jupiter. Five of them namely Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Hypiea and Euphrosyne have been recognised. European Space Agency has found water vapour on Ceres on 22nd January, 2014.

Essay # 5. Comets:

The word comet is derived from Latin word ‘Stella Cometa’ which means ‘hairy star’. These celestial bodies were part of sun earlier and are made of frozen gases, ice and small rocky substances. Head of comet is 16 million kilometers in diameter and is followed by cloud of misty substance looking like a tail.

This tail is also lakhs of kilometer long. Tail is never towards sun facing side of comet and shines with rays from Sun. Comet which passed through Solar System was first seen in 1705 and it passes close to sun after every 75.5 years. English scientist Edmond Halley founded it and it was therefore named Halley’s Comet.

Comets are being traced regularly. Their total number was 5,186 in August, 2014. Halley’s Comet was seen in 1910, then in 1986 and next it shall be sighted in 2062. Nucleus of Halley’s Comet is 16 x 8 x 8 kilometers and it is the darkest object in solar system. This comet is periodical one and may be sighted at specific intervals but all the comets are not periodical.

Essay # 6. Meteors or Meteorites:

One can see a streak of star light in the sky sometimes, it gives an impression that any part of star has broken away. These are actually meteorites. Parts of meteorites that remain unburnt and reach our Earth in small parts are named as meteorites.

When these enter the atmosphere of Earth, burn out immediately and vanish in shape of ash most of times. A part of Arizona desert in U.S. is known to have come into form due to striking of some meteor. There are, however, various principles about formation of meteors. Some thinkers part them parts of planet which has vanished while others say these are parts of Sun, Earth and Moon only.

Indian Museum at Kolkata is known for preserving remains of meteors. Biggest such museum in Asia, it has 468 meteor parts. Their study has concluded that meteors are made of metals like iron, nickel, aluminium, oxygen and tin.

These get attracted towards Earth because of gravity of Earth. On April 21, 2013 a meteor shower was observed in many parts of the world in which more than 20 shooting stars were seen within an hour. This shower is known as Orionid Meteor Shower. Such wonderful sights are very common in our solar system.

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Essay: The Universe

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Abstract The universe is a known place to our young and sensitive eyes. Stars galaxies, planets, comets, asteroids are part of this abundant place that has an end of 13. 8 billion years to us. The age of the universe was known by studying the oldest objects within the universe, which can be studied using binary system or the HR Diagram. Knowing how fast the universe is expanding can be done by knowing how close and far are objects from us and their velocity towards or away from our galaxy. Finally we can know the observable universe by knowing how light and light speed works and travels in space. Introduction What is in the universe? Galaxies, planets, stars, comets, asteroids, and much other chemical composition ‘stuff’ are part of the universe. We are not able to see the entire universe but just the observable part of it. The observable universe is a term referring to the volume of space that we are physically able to detect, it can be defined as what we are potentially able to see, is there more? That is unknown to our eyes. The universe is 13.8 billion years old to us this is until what our eyes can see. The age of the universe was known because of these main reasons, one, by studying the oldest objects within the universe and second, by measuring how fast the universe is expanding, but the one and most important is knowing how light and light speed works and travels in space. Main body Studying the oldest objects within the universe Many countless objects are part of the universe having each a different birthday, one year, ten years and up to a billion years of age. Studying the age of the objects in the universe has some work attached to it. The life cycle of a star is based on its mass (Redd). We can know that if a star is bright it has a bigger mass causing it to have a longer life cycle. Measuring the mass of a star is easier when using a binary system. Binary system is when two (bi) start orbit around each other. By measuring the orbital speed the orbital period and the size of the orbit we can get to know the mass of both the stars. Another easy method to know the mass of the star and therefore the age of it is using the H-R diagram. Depending where the star is in the H-R diagram we can know the mass and therefore its age. Therefore an example can be, if we want to know the age of star ‘A’ and star ‘B’ we first measure the speed, the orbital period between star ‘A’ and star ‘B’, the size of the orbit and we get to know the mass both. The stellar mass is the mass that we have been using and continue to use in order to know determine the age of a star. Hertzsprung’Russell diagram One of the most useful and powerful plots in astrophysics is the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (hereafter called the H-R diagram). It originated in 1911 when the Danish astronomer, Ejnar Hertzsprung, plotted the absolute magnitude of stars against their colour (hence effective temperature). Independently in 1913 the American astronomer Henry Norris Russell used spectral class against absolute magnitude. Their resultant plots showed that the relationship between temperature and luminosity of a star was not random but instead appeared to fall into distinct groups (Australia). This diagram has several different representation one of which is called the observational Hertzsprung- Russell diagram or color-magnitude diagram (CMD). What this diagram does is that when stars are at the same distance it compares the color, using the color index which can state which star is more luminous. Therefore once we are able to know which star is more luminous we can determine it age. How fast the universe is expanding For a fact we know that stars die but there are some stars that live longer than other and by discovering how old is one star and them discovering that another star is older we have come to know that they may not be the limit and by looking more in to it we may find older objects. The universe is expanding every day away from us and towards us. Galaxies and stars are moving and we can know if a star is close to us, away from us or if it is moving closer or farther away from us. Knowing the wavelength range by using infrared light can answer us where are the stars standing now and once we know where the stars are know we can know their color and therefore their age. Farther stars and galaxies are moving way faster from us that does closer stars and galaxies, this is due to the young age they have which allows them to move in a faster rate. Light The speed of light is what determines our possible visibility of the universe. The speed of light is defines as C= the speed of light= 300,000km/s or 3.0 * 10^8 m/s. A light year is the distance traveled in one year. If you see a star that is 40 light years away, you are seeing it as it was 40 years ago. Thus the deeper you peek into space, the farther you are seeing back in time. Any event that happened beyond a certain point in the past is unknowable to us if the signal from it hasn’t had time to reach us (Observable universe). We can see up to objects that are 13.8 billion light years away from us because 13.8 billion light years is our visible limit. For that reason the universe that old, and there may be more but it has not yet reached our eyes. Conclusion Human beings have a limit of the visibility of the universe. The universe to our yes is enormous with all different stars ‘stuff’ that are part of it. Our eyes and our telescopes can only see back to 13.8 billion years. The light has traveled to us in a speed of 13.8 billion light years, and has not yet seen more. We do not have knowledge of how old or what is beyond what we see, this will be known in several billion years more, if they are to come.

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The physical world.

• In the Beginning
• Goldilocks and the Three Planets
• Water, Water
• On Being Round
• The Coriolis Force
• The Tidal Force
• The Five Points of Lagrange
• Going Ballistic
• On Earth As in the Heavens
• The Periodic Table of the Cosmos
• Stick-in-the-Mud Astronomy
• Let There Be Light
• The Importance of Being Constant
• Coming Attractions
• The Greatest Story Ever Told
• Ends of the World
• The Search for Planets

Cultural Reflections

• The Power of a Cosmic Perspective
• The Perimeter of Ignorance
• The Cosmic Perspective
• In Defense of the Big Bang
• Pluto’s Honor
• The Search for Life in the Universe
• The Universe as a Muse
• By Any Other Name
• Fear of Numbers
• Hollywood Nights
• Let There Be Dark
• Footprints in the Sands of Science
• A Perfect World
• Doubling Time

Spaceflight & Exploration

• Delusions of Space Enthusiasts
• Reaching for the Stars: America’s Choice
• Space Travel Troubles
• Launching the Right Stuff
• Heading Out
• Spacecraft Behaving Badly

The Scientific Method

• The Beginning of Science
• Forged in the Stars
• On Being Baffled
• Certain Uncertainties, Part I
• Onward to the Edge
• Outward Bound
• Certain Uncertainties, Part II
• Coming to Our Senses
• Over the Rainbow
• Colors of the Cosmos
• Pluto’s Requiem

Home — Essay Samples — Science — Universe — The Beginning of the Universe

The Beginning of The Universe

• Categories: Creation Myth Universe

About this sample

Words: 1323 |

Published: Nov 16, 2018

Words: 1323 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Works Cited

• Greene, B. (2004). The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. Knopf.
• Guth, A. H. (1997). The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins. Perseus Books.
• Hawking, S. (1988). A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Bantam Books.
• Krauss, L. M. (2012). A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Free Press.
• Lemaître, G. (1931). The Primeval Atom Hypothesis and the Problem of Clusters of Galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 91(5), 483-490.
• Linde, A. (1990). Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology. Contemporary Concepts in Physics, 5, 295-339.
• Peebles, P. J. E. (1993). Principles of Physical Cosmology. Princeton University Press.
• Penrose, R. (2004). The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. Vintage Books.
• Rees, M. J. (2000). Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe. Basic Books.
• Weinberg, S. (1972). Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity. John Wiley & Sons.

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Best Science Essay Examples

Origin of the universe: summary.

680 words | 3 page(s)

In the beginning, there was nothing, or in another way of wording it, only “inside.” At least that is according to Stephen Hawking in episode three of his Documentary series, “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking” (Smithsonian). This episode describes the formation of the universe as we know it. As this is a difficult topic to explain, some simplifications are made: for example, comparing all the initial matter of the universe to ball bearings, or comparing the sun to an onion, but what I think we really need to take away from this video are the two main ingredients of our universe that boils down to matter and gravity because without one, you cannot have the other (Hawking).

At the beginning, when space did not even exist yet, about 14 billion years ago, the Big Bang occurred (Science). From that initial explosion of both matter and anti-matter of which there was only a little more matter present than antimatter that survived until today, (which is good as one destroys the other when they combine and we would not exist if they were equal in number) the remaining matter expanded out from the center at almost unimaginable speeds, cooling as it moved farther and farther apart and forming our universe (Hawking).

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From the stuff that survived the initial creation and destruction of the universe, there was enough matter left to form our entire universe. But the real grit of the program is how the universe was formed. As described with ball bearings, when all the left over matter had been roughly distributed almost evenly across space, not everything was distributed evenly, which is the reason the universe did not stagnate and instead is changing constantly. The fact that gravity was and still is pulling on everything, causing constant movement in unequal distribution, matter was able to collide and combine with other matter around it producing something new. Because of this movement, atoms were formed as the initial matter of the universe collided and stuck together. The first atoms to form were Hydrogen as they are the lightest and simplest, but that is not where things stop because gravity is always at work even among the tiniest of elements. As these atoms gathered together the original space gas was formed and from the bunching of this material stars were formed. And just like our planet (and ogres), within every star, there are layers almost like an onion on a massive scale (Smithsonian).

Within the giant onion that is a star, hydrogen atoms form the outer most layer, but as those atoms combine due to gravity, new atoms like Helium are formed, which by its very nature is heavier that hydrogen atoms, forcing them to sink in more towards the center of the star as gravity pulls on them more than the hydrogen atoms. Then, from there larger and larger atoms form like Carbon (from the combination of hydrogen atoms), Oxygen (from the combination of carbon atoms) and Iron (from the combination of oxygen atoms) each with their own more internal layer than the last (Smithsonian).

As each pair of atoms combines through fusion, heat and energy is produced in excess of 10 million degrees which provides energy for the entire solar system and our planet in particular. There is an end to this cycle though, once iron is formed, no more excess energy is produced from its fusion thus, once all the atoms making up the sun form into a core of iron or even heavier elements like gold, platinum or lead, there will be no more fuel to sustain the sun as we know it. Hence, when that happens, the Sun’s light will go out as will our planet and all life as we know it unless somehow we find a way to preserve ourselves somewhere new (Smithsonian).  

• Hawking, Stephen, “The Origin of the Universe,” http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-origin-of-the-universe.html.
• Science, “Origins of the Universe” National Geographic, 2015.
• Smithson, Darlow. “Stephen Hawking’s Universe—The Story of Everything” Vimeo. Narration by Stephen Hawking and Benedict Cumberbatch, May 2, 2010 https://vimeo.com/17777145

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Churchill essay on the possibility of alien life discovered in US college

Winston Churchill’s essay Are We Alone in the Universe? was penned the year before he became prime minister, and reveals his keen interest in science

It might never have seen the light of day. Lost and long forgotten, the unpublished essay by Winston Churchill was penned a year before he became Britain’s prime minister. The matter to which he applied his great mind? Not politics, not the battlefield, but the existence of alien life.

The 11-page article was probably intended for the now defunct Sunday newspaper the News of the World, but for reasons unknown the essay remained with his publisher and only recently resurfaced at the US National Churchill Museum at Westminster College in Missouri.

In the essay, Churchill ponders the conditions that make for a habitable world, and on considering the vast number of stars perhaps circled by alien planets, comes to the conclusion that the answer to the essay’s title question, Are We Alone in the Universe?, was surely a resounding “no”.

“The first time I saw it, I thought the combination of Churchill and such a big question had to be a fascinating read, and that proved to be right,” Timothy Riley, the museum’s director, told the Guardian. “It is completely fitting that Churchill would ask such a question. He was keenly interested in science and technological advancement and supported it throughout his long career.” Riley said the museum hopes to make the essay public as soon as it can.

Found by chance in a box at the museum, the newly unearthed article reveals more than Churchill’s ease with scientific thinking. It also shows that as Europe stood on the brink of war, one of the most influential politicians of modern times was hard at work on an article about little green men.

Churchill read keenly on science from an early age. While stationed in India with the British Army, the 22-year-old read a primer on physics and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In the 1920s and 1930s he wrote scores of magazine and newspaper pieces on popular science, ranging from nuclear fusion to evolution and cells.

He went on to become the first prime minister to hire a science adviser and created government funding for labs, telescopes and technology which led to post-war discoveries and inventions from molecular genetics to x-ray crystallography .

Writing in the journal Nature , Mario Livio , an astrophysicist and author of an upcoming book, Why? What Makes Us Curious describes how he apparently became the first scientist to read Churchill’s long lost essay on a recent visit to Missouri. “What’s so amazing about the piece is that here is a man, arguably the greatest statesperson of the twentieth century, and in 1939 he not only has the interest, but finds the time, to write an essay about a purely scientific question,” Livio said.

Livio ran a scientist’s eye over Churchill’s essay and was impressed at what he found. “His logic, his train of thought, mirrors exactly what we think today when we think about this question of life elsewhere,” he said.

Churchill starts out by defining what is meant by “life”. Most important, he writes, is the ability to “breed and multiply”. He then moves on to the need for liquid water, an apparent necessity for all living things that still drives the search for alien organisms today.

Modern astronomers talk about stars having a “habitable zone” , a Goldilocks region around them where a planet’s temperature will be neither too hot nor too cold to sustain liquid water. Churchill hit on the same idea, writing that life can only survive “between a few degrees of frost and the boiling point of water.” He was not spot on with every observation. On Earth, some bacteria can survive from -25C to 120C (-13F to 248F).

Churchill was a devoted fan of HG Wells and began his essay shortly after the 1938 US radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds , which whipped up Mars fever in the media. He reasoned that Venus and Mars were the only places in the solar system other than Earth that could harbour life, the other planets being too cold, or on Mercury’s sun-facing side, too hot.

At the time Churchill penned the essay, astronomers favoured a theory that had planets form when stars ripped material off one another as they swept past. Because such encounters were bound to be rare, he reasoned that our sun might be alone in hosting planets. But Churchill proved a good sceptic. “I am not sufficiently conceited,” he writes,” to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets.” His intuition was right. Astronomers have now spotted thousands of planets beyond the solar system.

Step by step, Churchill reaches a view and expresses it a final sentence that mixes despair with optimism. He writes: “I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilisation here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.”

Richard Toye, professor of history at Exeter University, and author of three books on Churchill, said the great wartime leader wrote scores of newspaper and magazine articles before he took office to fund his expensive lifestyle. It was not unknown for Churchill to jot down notes and pay a ghostwriter to flesh a piece out for him.

“It’s always interesting to find something unpublished by Churchill,” Toye said. “This is definitely the kind of thing that would have stimulated his imagination, and equally he would have seen it as a potentially saleable topic for the various Sunday newspapers and American magazines which he liked to publish in.”

“He always spent more money than was coming in and he always had to sell the rights to something or other to keep himself afloat,” Toye added. “Often he managed to do it by the skin of his teeth.”

At a time when a number of today’s politicians shun science, Livio said he found it moving to recall a leader who engaged with it so profoundly. “It does evoke some nostalgia to a time when high ranking politicians could think about such profound scientific questions,” he said.

• Winston Churchill

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12 Great University of California Essay Examples

What’s covered, essay #1: leadership, essay #2: creativity, essay #3: creativity, essay #4: creativity, essay #5: talent, essay #6: talent, essay #7: academic interest, essay #8: academic interest, essay #9: community, essay #10: community, essay #11: community, essay #12: community.

The University of California system is comprised of nine undergraduate universities, and is one of the most prestigious public school systems in the country. The UC schools have their own application system, and students must respond to four of eight personal insight questions in 350 words each. Every UC school you apply to receives the same application and essays, so it’s important that your responses accurately represent your personality and writing abilities. 

In this post, we’ll share some UC essay examples and go over what they did well and where they could improve. We will also point you to free resources you can use to improve your college essays. 

Please note: Looking at examples of real essays students have submitted to colleges can be very beneficial to get inspiration for your essays. You should never copy or plagiarize from these examples when writing your own essays. Colleges can tell when an essay isn’t genuine and will not view students favorably if they plagiarized. 

Read our guide to the UC personal insight questions for more tips on writing strong essays for each of the prompts.

Prompt: Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes, or contributed to group efforts over time. (350 words)

1400 lines of code. 6 weeks. 1 Pizza.

I believe pizza makers are the backbone of society. Without pizza, life as we know it would cease to exist. From a toddler’s birthday party to President Obama’s sporadic campaigning cravings, these 8 slices of pure goodness cleverly seep into every one of our lives; yet, we never talk about it. In a very cheesy way, I find representation in a pizza maker. 

The most perplexing section of physiology is deciphering electrocardiograms. According to our teacher, this was when most students hit their annual trough. We had textbooks and worksheets, but viewing printed rhythms and attempting to recognize them in real-time is about as straining as watching someone eat pizza crust-first. Furthermore, online simulators were vastly over-engineered, featuring complex interfaces foreign to high-school students.

Eventually, I realized the only way to pull myself out of the sauce was by creating my own tools. This was also the first year I took a programming course, so I decided to initiate a little hobbyist experiment by extrapolating knowledge from Computer Science and Physiology to code and share my own Electrocardiogram Simulator. To enhance my program, I went beyond the textbook and classroom by learning directly from Java API – the programmer’s Bible.

The algorithms I wrote not only simulated rhythms in real-time but also actively engaged with the user, allowing my classmates and I to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the curriculum. Little did I know that a small project born out of desperation would eventually become a tool adopted by my teacher to serve hundreds of students in the future.

Like pizza, people will reap the benefits of my app over and over again, and hardly anyone will know its maker. Being a leader doesn’t always mean standing at the front of rallies, giving speeches, and leading organizations. Yes, I have done all three, but this app taught me leaders are also found behind-the-scenes, solving problems in unimaginable ways and fulfilling the hidden, yet crucial niches of the world. 

1400 lines of code, and 6 weeks later, it’s time to order a pizza. 

What the Essay Did Well

This is a great essay because it is both engaging and informative. What exactly does it inform us about? The answer: the personality, work ethic, and achievements of this student (exactly what admissions officers want to hear about).

With regards to personality, the pizza through-line—which notably starts the essay, ends the essay, and carries us through the essay—speaks volumes about this student. They are admittedly “cheesy,” but they appear unabashedly themself. They own their goofiness. That being said, the student’s pizza connections are also fitting and smoothly advance their points—watching someone eat pizza crust-first is straining and pizza is an invention that hardly anyone can identify the maker of. 

While we learn about this student’s fun personality in this essay, we also learn about their work ethic. A student who takes the initiative to solve a problem that no one asked them to solve is the kind of student an admissions officer wants to admit. The phrase “I decided to initiate a little hobbyist experiment” alone tells us that this student is a curious go-getter.

Lastly, this student tells us about their achievements in the last two paragraphs. Not only did they take the initiative to create this program, but it was also successful. On top of that, it’s notable how this student’s accomplishments as a leader defy the traditional expectations people have for leaders. The student’s ability to demonstrate their untraditional leadership path is an achievement in itself that sets the student apart form other applicants.

What Could Be Improved

This is a strong essay as is, but the one way this student could take it above and beyond would be to tell less and show more. To really highlight the student’s writing ability, the essay should  show the reader all the details it’s currently telling us. For example, these sentences primarily tell the reader what happened: “The most perplexing section of physiology is deciphering electrocardiograms. According to our teacher, this was when most students hit their annual trough.” 

Rewriting this sentence to show the reader the student’s impetus for creating their app could look like this: “When my teacher flashed the electrocardiogram on the screen, my once attentive physiology class became a sea of blank stares and furrowed brows.” This sentence still conveys the key details—student’s in the physiology class found electrocardiograms to be the hardest unit of the year—but it does so in a far more descriptive way. Implementing this exercise of rewriting sentences to show what happened throughout the piece would elevate the entire essay.

Prompt: Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side. (350 words)

For the past few years, participating in debate has been one of the foremost expressions of my creativity. Nothing is as electrifying as an Asian parliamentary-style debate. Each team is given only thirty minutes to prepare seven-minute speeches to either support or oppose the assigned motion. Given the immense time pressure, this is where my creativity shines most brightly.

To craft the most impactful and convincing argument, I have to consider the context of the motion, different stakeholders, the goals we want to achieve, the mechanisms to reach those goals, and so much more. I have to frame these arguments effectively and paint a compelling and cohesive world to sway my listeners to my side on both an emotional and logical level. For example, In a debate about the implementation of rice importation in the Philippines, I had to frequently switch between the macro perspective by discussing the broad economic implications of the policy and the micro perspective by painting a picture of the struggles that local rice farmers would experience when forcefully thrust into an increasingly competitive global economy. It’s a tough balancing act.

To add to the challenge, there is an opposing team on the other side of the room hell-bent on disproving everything I say. They generate equally plausible sounding arguments, and my mission is to react on the spot to dispel their viewpoints and build up our team’s case.

When two debate teams, both well-prepared and hungry for victory, face off and try to out-think one another, they clash to form a sixty-minute thunderstorm raining down fierce arguments and rebuttals. They fill up a room with unbelievable energy. After several years of debate, I have developed the capacity to still a room of fury and chaos with nothing but my words and wit.

Debate has been instrumental in shaping me into the person I am today. Because of debate, I have become a quicker and stronger thinker. Lightning quick on my feet, I am ready to thoroughly and passionately defend my beliefs at a moment’s notice.

This prompt is about creativity, though its wording emphasizes how students aren’t required to talk about typically-creative subjects. That said, it might take a bit more work and explanation (even creativity, one could say) to position a logical process as creative. This student’s main strength is the way they convince the reader that debate is creative.

First, they identify how “Asian parliamentary-style debate” differs from other forms of debate, emphasizing how time constraints necessitate the use of creativity. Then, they explain how both the argument’s content (the goals and solutions they outline) and the argument’s composition (the way they frame the argument) must be creatively orchestrated to be convincing. 

To drive home the point that debate is a creative process, this student provides an example of how they structured their argument about rice importation in the Philippines. This essay is successful because, after reading it, an admissions officer has no doubt that this student can combine logic and creativity to think intellectually.

One aspect of this essay that could be improved is the language use. Although there are some creative metaphors like the “sixty-minute thunderstorm raining down fierce arguments”, the essay is lacking the extra oomph and wow-factor that carefully chosen diction provides. In the second paragraph, the student repeats the phrase “I have to” three different times when stronger, more active verbs could have been used.

Essays should always reflect the student’s natural voice and shouldn’t sound like every word came straight out of a thesaurus, but that doesn’t mean they can’t incorporate a bit of colorful language. If this student took the time to go through their essay and ask themself if an overused word could be replaced with a more exciting one, it would make the essay much more interesting to read.

As I open the door to the Makerspace, I am greeted by a sea of cubicle-like machines and I watch eagerly, as one of them completes the final layer of my print.

Much like any scientific experiment, my countless failures in the Makerspace – hours spent designing a print, only to have it disintegrate – were my greatest teachers. I learned, the hard way, what types of shapes and patterns a 3D printer would play nice to. Then, drawing inspiration from the engineering method, I developed a system for myself – start with a solid foundation and add complexity with each iteration – a flourish here, a flying buttress there. 

But it wasn’t until the following summer, vacationing on a beach inundated with plastic, that the “aha” moment struck. In an era where capturing people’s attention in a split-second is everything, what better way to draw awareness to the plastic problem than with quirky 3D-printed products? By the time I had returned home, I had a business case on my hands and a desire to make my impact.

Equipped with vital skills from the advanced math-and-science courses I had taken in sophomore year, I began applying these to my growing business. Using my AP Chemistry analytical laboratory skills, I devised a simple water bath experiment to test the biodegradability claims of 3D-printer filaments from different manufacturers, guaranteeing that my products could serve as both a statement and play their part for our planet. The optimization techniques I had learned in AP Calculus were put to good use, as I determined the most space-efficient packaging for my products, reducing my dependence on unsustainable filler material. Even my designs were tweaked and riffed on to reflect my newfound maturity and keen eye for aesthetics.

My business is still going strong today, raising $1000 to date. I attribute this success to a fateful spark of creative inspiration, which has, and will, continue to inspire me to weave together multiple disciplines to address issues as endemic as the plastic problem. 

This essay begins with a simple, yet highly effective hook. It catches readers’ attention by only giving a hint about the essay’s main topic, and being a standalone paragraph makes it all the more intriguing. 

The next paragraph then begins with a seamless transition that ties back to the Makerspace. The essay goes on to show the writer’s creative side and how it has developed over time. Rather than directly stating “I am most creative when I am working on my business,” the writer tells the story of their creativity while working with 3-D printers and vacationing on the beach. 

It is the “aha” moment that perhaps responds to the prompt best. Here we get to see the writer create a new idea on the spot. The next two paragraphs then show the writer executing on their idea in great detail. Small and specific details, such as applying analytical laboratory skills from AP Chemistry, make the writer’s creativity come to life. 

From start to finish, this essay shows that the key to writing a stellar response to this prompt is to fill your writing with details and vivid imagery. 

The second to last paragraph of this essay focuses a bit too much on how the writer built their business. Though many of these details show the writer’s creativity in action, a few of them could be restated to make the connection to creativity clearer. The last sentences could be rewritten like so: 

Working on my business was where my creativity blossomed. In my workshop, optimization techniques that I learned in AP Calculus became something new — the basis for space-efficient packaging for my products that reduced my dependence on unsustainable filler material…

Profusely sweating after trying on what felt like a thousand different outfits, I collapsed on the floor in exasperation. The heaping pile of clothes on my bed stared me down in disdain; with ten minutes left to spare before the first day of seventh grade, I let go of my screaming thoughts and settled on the very first outfit I tried on: my favorite.

Donning a neon pink dress, that moment marked the first time I chose expression over fear. Being one of the few Asians in my grade, clothing was my source of disguise. I looked to the bold Stacy London of What Not to Wear for daily inspiration, but, in actuality, I dressed to conceal my uniqueness so I wouldn’t be noticed for my race. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt, I envied the popular girls who hiked their shorts up just a few inches higher than dress code allowed and flaunted Uggs decorated with plastic jewels, a statement that Stacy London would have viewed as heinous and my mother impractical. 

However, entering school that day and the days after, each compliment I received walking down the hallways slowly but surely broke down the armored shield. Morphing into an outlet to amplify my voice and creativity, dressing up soon became what I looked forward to each morning. I was awarded best dressed the year after that during my middle school graduation, a recognition most would scoff at. But, to me, that flimsy paper certificate was a warm embrace telling me that I was valued for my originality and expression. I was valued for my differences. 

Confidence was what I found and is now an essential accessory to every outfit I wear. Taking inspiration from vintage, simplistic silhouettes and Asian styles, I adorn my body’s canvas with a variety of fabrics and vibrant colors, no longer depriving it of the freedom to self expression and cultural exploration. I hope that my future will open new doors for me, closet doors included, at the University of California with opportunities to intertwine creativity with my identity even further.

Colorful language and emotion are conveyed powerfully in this essay, which is one of its key strengths. We can see this in the first paragraph, where the writer communicates that they were feeling searing judgment by using a metaphor: “the heaping pile of clothes on my bed stared me down.” The writer weaves other rich phrases into the essay — for example, “my screaming thoughts” — to show readers their emotions. All of these writing choices are much more moving than plainly stating “I was nervous.”

The essay moves on to tell a story that responds to the prompt in a unique way. While typical responses will be about a very direct example of expressing creativity, e.g. oil painting, this essay has a fittingly creative take on the prompt. The story also allows the writer to avoid a common pitfall — talking more about the means of being creative rather than how those means allow you to express yourself. In other words, make sure to avoid talking about the act of oil painting so much that your essay loses focus on what painting means to you.

The last sentence of the essay is one more part to emulate. “I hope that my future will open new doors for me, closet doors included…” is a well-crafted, flawlessly succinct metaphor that looks to the future while connecting the end of the essay to its beginning. The metaphors are then juxtaposed with a summary of the essay’s main topic: “intertwine creativity with my identity.” 

This essay’s main areas for improvement are grammatical. What Not to Wear should be italicized, “self-expression” should be hyphenated, and the last sentence could use the following tweaks to make it less of a run-on: “I hope that my future will open new doors for me, closet doors included, at the University of California. There, I will have opportunities to intertwine creativity with my identity even further.”

Since identity is the main topic of this essay, it would also be fitting for the writer to go into more depth about it. The immediate takeaways from the essay are that the writer is Asian and interested in fashion — however, more descriptions could be added to these parts. For example, the writer could replace Asian with Laotian-American and change a sentence in the second to last paragraph to “dressing up in everything from bell bottom jeans to oversized flannel shirts soon became what I looked forward to each morning.”

Prompt: What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time? (350 words)

Let’s fast-forward time. Strides were made toward racial equality. Healthcare is accessible to all; however, one issue remains. Our aquatic ecosystems are parched with dead coral from ocean acidification. Climate change has prevailed.

Rewind to the present day.

My activism skills are how I express my concerns for the environment. Whether I play on sandy beaches or rest under forest treetops, nature offers me an escape from the haste of the world. When my body is met by trash in the ocean or my nose is met by harmful pollutants, Earth’s pain becomes my own. 

Substituting coffee grinds as fertilizer, using bamboo straws, starting my sustainable garden, my individual actions needed to reach a larger scale. I often found performative activism to be ineffective when communicating climate concerns. My days of reposting awareness graphics on social media never filled the ambition I had left to put my activism skills to greater use. I decided to share my ecocentric worldview with a coalition of environmentalists and host a climate change rally outside my high school.

Meetings were scheduled where I informed students about the unseen impact they have on the oceans and local habitual communities. My fingers were cramped from all the constant typing and investigating of micro causes of the Pacific Waste Patch, creating reusable flyers, displaying steps people could take from home in reducing their carbon footprint. I aided my fellow environmentalists in translating these flyers into other languages, repeating this process hourly, for five days, up until rally day. 

It was 7:00 AM. The faces of 100 students were shouting, “The climate is changing, why can’t we?” I proudly walked on the dewy grass, grabbing the microphone, repeating those same words. The rally not only taught me efficient methods of communication but it echoed my environmental activism to the masses. The City of Corona would be the first of many cities to see my activism, as more rallies were planned for various parts of SoCal. My once unfulfilled ambition was fueled by my tangible activism, understanding that it takes more than one person to make an environmental impact.

One of the largest strengths of this response is its speed. From the very beginning, we are invited to “fast-forward” and “rewind” with the writer. Then, after we focus ourselves in the present, this writer keeps their quick pace with sentences like “Substituting coffee grounds as fertilizer, using bamboo straws, starting my sustainable garden, my individual actions needed to reach a larger scale.” A common essay-writing blunder is using a predictable structure that loses the attention of the reader, but this unique pacing keeps things interesting.

Another positive of this essay is how their passion for environmental activism shines through. The essay begins by describing the student’s connection to nature (“nature offers me an escape from the haste of the world”), moves into discussing the personal actions they have taken (“substituting coffee grounds as fertilizer”), and then explains the rally the student hosted. While the talent the student is writing about is their ability to inspire others to fight against climate change, establishing the personal affinity towards nature and individual steps they took demonstrate the development of their passion. This makes their talent appear much more significant and unique. 

This essay could be improved by being more specific about what this student’s talent is. There is no sentence that directly states what this student considers to be their talent. Although the essay is still successful at displaying the student’s personality, interests, and ambition, by not explicitly mentioning their talent, they leave it up to the reader’s interpretation.

Depending on how quickly they read the essay or how focused they are, there’s a possibility the reader will miss the key talent the student wanted to convey. Making sure to avoid spoon-feeding the answer to their audience, the student should include a short sentence that lays out what they view as their main talent.

At six, Mama reads me a story for the first time. I listen right up until Peter Pan talks about the stars in the night sky. “What’s the point of stars if they can’t be part of something?” Mama looks at me strangely before closing the book. “Sometimes, looking on is more helpful than actively taking part. Besides, stars listen- like you. You’re a good listener, aren’t you?” I nod. At eleven, my sister confides in me for the first time. She’s always been different, in a way even those ‘mind doctors’ could never understand. I don’t understand either, but I do know that I like my sister. She’s mean to me, but not like people are to her. She tells me how she sees the world, and chokes over her words in a struggle to speak. She trusts me, and that makes me happy. So, I listen. I don’t speak; this isn’t a story where I speak. At sixteen, I find myself involved with an organization that provides education to rural children. Dakshata is the first person I’ve tutored in Hindi. She’s also my favorite. So, when she interrupts me mid-lesson one evening, lips trembling and eyes filling with tears, I decide to put my pen down and listen. I don’t speak; I don’t take part in this story. Later, as I hug the girl, I tell her about the stars and how her mother is among their kind- unable to speak yet forever willing to listen. Dakshata now loves the stars as much as I do. At seventeen, I realize that the first thing that comes to my mind when someone asks me about a skill I possess is my ability to listen. Many don’t see it as a skill, and I wouldn’t ask them to either, but it’s important. When you listen, you see, you need not necessarily understand, but you do comprehend. You empathize on a near-cosmic level with the people around you and learn so much more than you ever thought possible. Everything is a part of something- even the stars with their ears.

The essay as a whole is an excellent example of narrative-based writing. The narrative begins with a captivating hook. The first sentence catches the reader by surprise, since it does not directly respond to the prompt by naming the writer’s greatest talent or skill. Instead, it tells a childhood story which does not seem to be related to a skill at first. This creates intrigue, and the second sentence adds to it by introducing a conflict. It causes readers to wonder why Peter Pan’s stargazing would make a six year old stop listening — hooked into the story, they continue reading.

The writer continues to create a moving narrative by using dialogue. Dialogue allows the writer to show rather than tell , which is a highly effective way to make an essay convey emotion and keep readers’ attention. The writer also shows their story by using language such as “mind doctors” instead of “psychologists” — this immerses readers in the author’s perspective as an 11 year old at the time. 

Two motifs, or recurring themes, tie the essay together: listening and looking at the stars. The last paragraph powerfully concludes the essay by explaining these themes and circling back to the introduction.

Crafting transitions is one area where this essay could be improved. The paragraph after “I nod” begins abruptly, and without any sentence to connect the writer’s dialogue at age six with her experiences at age 11. One way to make the transition smoother would be to begin the paragraph after “I nod” with “I try to be a good listener again at eleven, when my sister confides in me for the first time.”

This essay would also be more impactful if the writer explained what they aspire to do with their ability to listen in the future. While it is most important for your essay to explain how your past experiences have made you who you are in the present, looking towards the future allows admissions readers to imagine the impact you might make after graduation. The writer could do this in the last paragraph of their essay by writing the following: “Many don’t see it as a skill, and I wouldn’t ask them to either, but I find it important — especially as an aspiring social worker.”

Prompt: Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom. (350 words)

I distinctly remember the smile on Perela’s face when she found out her mother would be nursed back to health. I first met Perela and her mother at the Lestonnac Free Clinic in San Bernardino where I volunteered as a Spanish translator. I was in awe of the deep understanding of biology that the medical team employed to discover solutions. Despite having no medical qualifications of my own, I realized that by exercising my abilities to communicate and empathize, I could serve as a source of comfort and encouragement for Perela and her mother. The opportunity to combine my scientific curiosity and passion for caring for people cultivated my interest in a career as a physician.

To further explore this interest, I attended a summer medical program at Georgetown University. I participated in lectures on circulation through the heart, practiced stitches on a chicken leg, and assisted in giving CPR to a dummy in the patient simulation laboratory. Every fact about the human body I learned brought with it ten new questions for me to research. I consistently stayed after each lecture to gain insight about how cells, tissues, and organs all work together to carry out immensely complicated functions. The next year, in my AP Biology class, I was further amazed with the interconnected biological systems as I learned about the relationships between the human body and ecosystems. I discussed with my teacher how environmental changes will impact human health and how we must broaden our perspectives to use medicine to tackle these issues.

By integrating environmental and medical science, we can develop effective solutions to reduce the adverse effects of environmental degradation that Perela’s mother may have faced unintentionally. I want to go into the medical field so I can employ a long-term approach to combat biology’s hidden anomalies with a holistic viewpoint. I look forward to utilizing my undergraduate classes and extracurriculars to prepare for medical school so I can fight for both health care and environmental protection.

This student primarily answers the prompt in their middle paragraph as they describe their experience at a summer medical program as well as their science coursework in high school. This content shows their academic curiosity and rigor, yet the best part of the essay isn’t the student’s response to the prompt. The best part of this essay is the way the student positions their interest in medicine as authentic and unique.

The student appears authentic when they admit that they haven’t always been interested in medical school. Many applicants have wanted to be doctors their whole life, but this student is different. They were just in a medical office to translate and help, then got hooked on the profession and took that interest to the next level by signing up for a summer program.

Additionally, this student positions themself as unique as they describe the specifics of their interest in medicine, emphasizing their concern with the ways medicine and the environment interact. This is also refreshing!

Of course, you should always answer the prompt, but it’s important to remember that you can make room within most prompts to say what you want and show off unique aspects of yourself—just as this student did.

One thing this student should be careful of is namedropping Georgetown for the sake of it. There is no problem in discussing a summer program they attended that furthered their interest in medicine, but there is a problem when the experience is used to build prestige. Admissions officers already know that this student attended a summer program at Georgetown because it’s on their application. The purpose of the essay is to show  why attending the program was a formative moment in their interest.

The essay gets at the  why a bit when it discusses staying after class to learn more about specific topics, but the student could have gone further in depth. Rather than explaining the things the student did during the program, like stitching chicken legs and practicing CPR, they should have continued the emotional reflection from the first paragraph by describing what they thought and felt when they got hands-on medical experience during the program. 

Save describing prestigious accomplishments for your extracurriculars and resume; your essay is meant to demonstrate what made you you.

I love spreadsheets.

It’s weird, I know. But there’s something endlessly fascinating about taking a bunch of raw numbers, whipping and whacking them into different shapes and forms with formulas and equations to reveal hidden truths about the universe. The way I like to think about it is that the universe has an innate burning desire to tell us its stories. The only issue is its inability to talk with us directly. Most human stories are written in simple words and letters, but the tales of the universe are encrypted in numbers and relationships, which require greater effort to decode to even achieve basic comprehension. After all, it took Newton countless experimentation to discover the love story between mass and gravitation.

In middle school, whenever I opened a spreadsheet, I felt like I was part of this big journey towards understanding the universe. It took me a couple of years, but I eventually found out that my interest had a name: Data Science. With this knowledge, I began to read extensively about the field and took online courses in my spare time. I found out that the spreadsheets I had been using was just the tip of the iceberg. As I gained more experience, I started using more powerful tools like R (a statistical programming language) which allowed me to use sophisticated methods like linear regressions and decision trees. It opened my eyes to new ways to understand reality and changed the way I approached the world.

The thing I love most about data science is its versatility. It doesn’t matter if the data at hand is about the airflow on an owl’s wing or the living conditions of communities most crippled by poverty. I am able to utilize data science to dissect and analyze issues in any field. Each new method of analysis yields different stories, with distinct actors, settings, and plots. I’m an avid reader of the stories of the universe, and one day I will help the world by letting the universe write its own narrative.

This is an essay that draws the reader in. The student’s candid nature and openness truly allows us to understand why they are fascinated with spreadsheets themself, which in turn makes the reader appreciate the meaning of this interest in the student’s life. 

First, the student engages readers with their conversational tone, beginning “I love spreadsheets. It’s weird, I know,” followed shortly after by the phrase “whipping and whacking.” Then, they introduce their idea to us, explaining how the universe is trying to tell us something through numbers and saying that Newton discovered “the love story between mass and gravitation,” and we find ourselves clearly following along. They put us right there with them, on their team, also trying to discover the secrets of the universe. It is this bond between the student and the reader that makes the essay so engaging and worth reading.

Because the essay is focused on the big picture, the reader gets a sense of the wide-eyed wonderment this student experiences when they handle and analyze data. The student takes us on the “big journey towards understanding the universe” through the lens of Data Science. Explaining both the tools the student has used, like R and statistical regression, and the ideas the student has explored, like owl’s wings and poverty, demonstrates how this student fits into the micro and macro levels of Data Science. The reader gets a complete picture of how this student could change the world through this essay—something admissions officers always want to see.

The biggest thing that would improve this essay is an anecdote. As it’s written, the essay looks at Data Science from a more theoretical or aspirational perspective. The student explains all that Data Science can enable, but besides for explaining that they started coding with spreadsheets and R, they provide very little personal experience working with Data Science. This is where an anecdote would elevate the essay.

Adding a story about the first data set they examined or an independent project they undertook as a hobby would have elicited more emotion and allowed for the student to showcase their accomplishments and way of thinking. For example, they could delve into the feeling of enlightenment that came from first discovering a pattern in the universe. Or maybe they could describe how analyzing data was the catalyst that led them to reach out to local businesses to help them improve their revenue. 

If you have an impactful and enduring interest, such as this student does, you will have at least one anecdote you could include in your essay. You’ll find that essays with anecdotes are able to work in more emotional reflection that make the essay more memorable and the student more likable.

Prompt: What have you done to make your community a better place? (350 words)

Blinking sweat from my eyes, I raised my chin up to the pullup bar one last time before dropping down, my muscles trembling. But despite my physical exhaustion at the end of the workout, mentally, I felt reinvigorated and stronger than ever.

Minutes later, I sat at my computer, chatting with my friends about our first week in quarantine. After listening to numerous stories concerning boredom and loneliness, it struck me that I could use my passion for fitness to help my friends—I jumped at the chance to do so. 

After scouring the internet for the most effective exercises and fitness techniques, I began hosting Zoom workouts, leading friends, family, and anyone else who wanted to join in several fun exercises each week. I hoped these meetings would uplift anyone struggling during quarantine, whether from loneliness, uncertainty, or loss of routine. I created weekly workout plans, integrating cardio, strength, and flexibility exercises into each. Using what I learned from skating, I incorporated off-ice training exercises into the plans and added stretching routines to each session. 

Although many members were worried that they wouldn’t be able to complete exercises as well as others and hesitated to turn their cameras on, I encouraged them to show themselves on screen, knowing we’d only support one another. After all, the “face-to-face” interactions we had while exercising were what distinguished our workouts from others online; and I hoped that they would lead us to grow closer as a community. 

As we progressed, I saw a new-found eagerness in members to show themselves on camera, enjoying the support of others. Seeing how far we had all come was immensely inspiring: I watched people who couldn’t make it through one circuit finish a whole workout and ask for more; instead of staying silent during meetings, they continually asked for tips and corrections.

Despite the limitations placed on our interactions by computer screens, we found comfort in our collective efforts, the camaraderie between us growing with every workout. For me, it confirmed the strength we find in community and the importance of helping one another through tough times.

This essay accomplishes three main goals: it tells a story of how this student took initiative, it explores the student’s values, and it demonstrates their emotional maturity. We really get a sense of how this student improved their community while also gaining a large amount of insight into what type of person this student is.

With regards to initiative, this student writes about a need they saw in their community and the steps they took to satisfy that need. They describe the extensive thought that went into their decisions as they outline the planning of their classes and their unique decision to incorporate skating techniques in at-home workouts.

Additionally, they explore their values, including human connection. The importance of connection to this student is obvious throughout the essay as they write about their desire “to grow closer as a community.” It is particularly apparent with their final summarizing sentence: “For me, it confirmed the strength we find in community and the importance of helping one another through tough times.”

Lastly, this student positions themself as thoughtful when they recognize the way that embarrassment can get in the way of forming community. They do this through the specific example of feeling embarrassment when turning on one’s camera during a video call—a commonly-felt feeling. This ability to recognize fear of embarrassment as an obstacle to camaraderie shows maturity on the part of this applicant. 

This essay already has really descriptive content, a strong story, and a complete answer to the prompt, however there is room for every essay to improve. In this case, the student could have worked more descriptive word choice and figurative language into their essay to make it more engaging and impressive. You want your college essay to showcase your writing abilities as best as possible, while still sounding like you.

One literary device that would have been useful in this essay is a conceit or an extended metaphor . Essays that utilize conceits tend to begin with a metaphor, allude to the metaphor during the body of the paragraph, and end by circling back to the original metaphor. All together, it makes for a cohesive essay that is easy to follow and gives the reader a satisfying opening and conclusion to the essay.

The idea at the heart of this essay—working out to strengthen a community—would make for a great conceit. By changing the anecdote at the beginning to maybe reflect the lack of strength the student felt when working out alone and sprinkling in words and phrases that allude to strength and exercise during the essay, the last sentence (“For me, it confirmed the strength we find in community and the importance of helping one another through tough times”) would feel like a fulfilling end to the conceit rather than just a clever metaphor thrown in. 

Prompt: What have you done to make your school or your community a better place? (350 words)

The scent of eucalyptus caressed my nose in a gentle breeze. Spring had arrived. Senior class activities were here. As a sophomore, I noticed a difference between athletic and academic seniors at my high school; one received recognition while the other received silence. I wanted to create an event celebrating students academically-committed to four-years, community colleges, trades schools, and military programs. This event was Academic Signing Day.

The leadership label, “Events Coordinator,” felt heavy on my introverted mind. I usually was setting up for rallies and spirit weeks, being overlooked around the exuberant nature of my peers. 

I knew a change of mind was needed; I designed flyers, painted posters, presented powerpoints, created student-led committees, and practiced countless hours for my introductory speech. Each committee would play a vital role on event day: one dedicated to refreshments, another to technology, and one for decorations. The fourth-month planning was a laborious joy, but I was still fearful of being in the spotlight. Being acknowledged by hundreds of people was new to me. 

The day was here. Parents filled the stands of the multi-purpose room. The atmosphere was tense; I could feel the angst building in my throat, worried about the impression I would leave. Applause followed each of the 400 students as they walked to their college table, indicating my time to speak. 

I walked up to the stand, hands clammy, expression tranquil, my words echoing to the audience. I thought my speech would be met by the sounds of crickets; instead, smiles lit up the stands, realizing my voice shone through my actions. I was finally coming out of my shell. The floor was met by confetti as I was met by the sincerity of staff, students, and parents, solidifying the event for years to come. 

Academic students were no longer overshadowed. Their accomplishments were equally recognized to their athletic counterparts. The school culture of athletics over academics was no longer imbalanced. Now, everytime I smell eucalyptus, it is a friendly reminder that on Academic Signing Day, not only were academic students in the spotlight but so was my voice.

This is a good essay because it describes the contribution the student made to their community and the impact that experience had on shaping their personality. Admissions officers get to see what this student is capable of and how they have grown, which is important to demonstrate in your essays. Throughout the essay there is a nice balance between focusing on planning the event and the emotions it elicited from this student, which is summed up in the last sentence: “not only were academic students in the spotlight but so was my voice.”

With prompts like this one (which is essentially a Community Service Essay ) students sometimes take very small contributions to their community and stretch them—oftentimes in a very obvious way. Here, the reader can see the importance of Academic Signing Day to the community and the student, making it feel like a genuine and enjoyable experience for all involved. Including details like the four months of planning the student oversaw, the specific committees they delegated tasks to, and the hundreds of students and parents that attended highlights the skills this student possesses to plan and execute such a large event.

Another positive aspect of this essay is how the student’s emotions are intertwined throughout the essay. We see this student go from being a shy figure in the background to the confident architect of a celebrated community event, all due to their motivation to create Academic Signing Day. The student consistently shows throughout the essay, instead of telling us what happened. One example is when they convey their trepidation to public speaking in this sentence: “I walked up to the stand, hands clammy, expression tranquil, my words echoing to the audience. I thought my speech would be met by the sounds of crickets.”

Employing detailed descriptions of feelings, emotions, fears, and body language all contribute to an essay that reveals so much in subtle ways. Without having to be explicitly told, the reader learns the student is ambitious, organized, a leader, and someone who deeply values academic recognition when they read this essay.

While this essay has many positives, there are a couple of things the student could work on. The first is to pay more attention to grammar. There was one obvious typo where the student wrote “the fourth-month planning was a laborious joy”, but there were also many sentences that felt clunky and disjointed. Each and every essay you submit should put your best foot forward and impress admissions officers with your writing ability, but typos immediately diminish your credibility as a writer and sincerity as an applicant.

It’s important to read through your essay multiple times and consider your specific word choice—does each word serve a purpose, could a sentence be rewritten to be less wordy, etc? However, it’s also important you have at least one other person edit your essay. Had this student given their essay to a fresh set of eyes they might have caught the typo and other areas in need of improvement.

Additionally, this student began and ended the essay with the smell of eucalyptus. Although this makes for an intriguing hook, it has absolutely nothing to do with the actual point of the essay. It’s great to start your essay with an evocative anecdote or figurative language, but it needs to relate to your topic. Rather than wasting words on eucalyptus, a much stronger hook could have been the student nervously walking up to the stage with clammy hands and a lump in their throat. Beginning the essay with a descriptive sentence that puts us directly into the story with the student would draw the reader in and get them excited about the topic at hand.

Prompt: What have you done to make your school or community a better place? (350 words) 

“I wish my parents understood.” Sitting at the lunch table, I listened as my friends aired out every detail of their life that they were too afraid to share with their parents. Sexuality, relationships, dreams; the options were limitless. While I enjoyed playing therapist every 7th period, a nagging sensation that perhaps their parents should understand manifested in me. Yet, my proposal was always met with rolling eyes; “I wish they understood” began every conversation, but nothing was being done beyond wishing on both sides. 

I wanted to help not just my friends but the countless other stories I was told of severed relationships and hidden secrets. Ultimately, my quest for change led me to BFB, a local nonprofit. Participating in their Youth Leadership program, I devised and implemented a plan for opening up the conversation between students and parents with the team I led. We successfully hosted relationship seminars with guest speakers specializing on a range of topics, from inclusive education to parental pressure, and were invited to speak for BFB at various external events with local government by the end of my junior year. Collaborating with mental health organizations and receiving over $1,000 in funding from international companies facilitated our message to spread throughout the community and eventually awarded us with an opportunity to tackle a research project studying mental health among teens during the pandemic with professors from the University at Buffalo and UC Los Angeles. 

While these endeavors collectively facilitated my team to win the competition, the most rewarding part of it all was receiving positive feedback from my community and close friends. “I wish my parents understood” morphed into “I’m glad they tried to understand”. I now lead a separate program under BFB inspired by my previous endeavors, advancing its message even further and leaving a legacy of change and initiative for future high schoolers in the program. As I leave for college, I hope to continue this work at the University of California and foster a diverse community that embraces understanding and growth across cultures and generations.

The essay begins with a strong, human-centered story that paints a picture of what the writer’s community looks like. The first sentence acts as a hook by leaving readers with questions — whose parents are being discussed, and what don’t they understand? With their curiosity now piqued, readers become intrigued enough to move on to the next sentences. The last sentence of the first paragraph and beginning of the second relate to the same topic of stories from friends, making for a highly effective transition.

The writer then does a great job of describing their community impact in specific detail, which is crucial for this prompt. Rather than using vague and overly generalized language, the writer highlights their role in BFB with strong action verbs like “devised” and “implemented.” They also communicate the full scope of their impact with quantifiable metrics like “$1,000 in funding,” all while maintaining a flowing narrative style.

The essay ends by circling back to the reason why the writer got involved in improving their community through BFB, which makes the essay more cohesive and moving. The last sentences connect their current experiences improving community with their future aspirations to do so, both in the wider world and at a UC school. This forward-looking part allows admissions officers to get a sense of what the writer might accomplish as a UC alum/alumna, and is certainly something to emulate.

This essay’s biggest weakness is its organization. Since the second paragraph contains lots of dense information about the writer’s role in BFB, it would benefit from a few sentences that tie it back to the narrative in the first paragraph. For instance, the third sentence of the paragraph could be changed like so: “Participating in their Youth Leadership program, I led my team through devising and implementing a plan to foster student-parent conversations — the ones that my 7th period friends were in need of.”

The last paragraph also has the potential to be reorganized. The sentence with the “I wish my parents understood” quote would be more powerful at the end of the paragraph rather than in the middle. With a short transition added to the beginning, the new conclusion would look like so: “ Through it all, I hope to help ‘I wish my parents understood’ morph into ‘I’m glad they tried to understand’ for my 7th period friends and many more.” 

I drop my toothbrush in the sink as I hear a scream. Rushing outside, I find my mom’s hand painfully wedged in the gap between our outward-opening veranda doors. I quickly open it, freeing her hand as she gasps in relief. 

As she ices her hand, I regard the door like I would a trivia question or math problem – getting to know the facts before I start working on a solution. I find that, surprisingly, there is not a single protrusion to open the door from the outside! 

Perhaps it was the fact that my mom couldn’t drive or that my dad worked long hours, but the crafts store was off-limits; I’ve always ended up having to get resourceful and creative with whatever materials happened to be on hand in order to complete my impromptu STEM projects or garage builds. Used plastic bottles of various shapes and sizes became buildings for a model of a futuristic city. Cylindrical capacitors from an old computer, a few inches in height, became scale-size storage tanks. 

Inspired by these inventive work-arounds and spurred on by my mom’s plight, I procure a Command Strip, a roll of tennis racket grip, and, of course, duct tape. I fashion a rudimentary but effective solution: a pull handle, ensuring she would never find herself stuck again.

A desire to instill others in my community with this same sense of resourcefulness led me to co-found “Repair Workshops” at my school – sessions where we teach students to fix broken objects rather than disposing of them. My hope is that participants will walk away with a renewed sense of purpose to identify problems faced by members of their community (whether that’s their neighbor next door or the planet as a whole) and apply their newfound engineering skills towards solutions.

As I look towards a degree and career in engineering and business, these connections will serve as my grounding point: my reminder that in disciplines growing increasingly quantitative, sometimes the best startup ideas or engineering solutions originate from a desire to to better the lives of people around me.

This essay is a good example of telling a story with an authentic voice. With its down-to-earth tone and short, punchy paragraphs, it stands out as a piece of writing that only the author could have written. That is an effective way for you to write any of your college essays as well.

After readers are hooked by the mention of screaming in the first sentence, the writer immerses the readers in their thinking. This makes the essay flow very naturally — rather than a first paragraph of narrative followed by an unrelated description of STEM projects, the whole essay is a cohesive story that shows how the writer came to improve their community. 

Their take on community also makes the essay stand out. While many responses to this prompt will focus on an amorphous, big-picture concept of community, such as school or humanity, this essay is about a community that the writer has a close connection to — their family. Family is also not the large group of people that most applicants would first attach to the word “community,” but writing about it here is a creative take on the prompt. Though explaining community impact is most important, choosing the most unique community you are a part of is a great way to make your essay stand out.

This essay’s main weakness is that the paragraph about Repair Workshops does not go into enough detail about community impact. The writer should highlight more specific examples of leadership here, since it would allow them to demonstrate how they hope to impact many more communities besides their family. 

After the sentence ending with “fix broken objects rather than disposing of them,” a new part could be added that shows how the writer taught students. For example, the writer could tell the story of how “tin cans became compost bins” as they explained the importance of making the world a better place. 

Then, at the end of the paragraph, the writer could more concretely explain the visions they have to expand the impact of Repair Workshops. A good concluding sentence could start with “I too hope to use engineering skills and resourcefulness to…” Adding this extra context would also make the paragraph transition better to the final paragraph of the essay, which somewhat abruptly begins by mentioning the writer’s previously unmentioned career interests in engineering and business.

Where to Get Feedback on Your UC Essays

Want feedback like this on your University of California essays before you submit? We offer expert essay review by advisors who have helped students get into their dream schools. You can book a review with an expert to receive notes on your topic, grammar, and essay structure to make your essay stand out to admissions officers. In fact, Alexander Oddo , an essay expert on CollegeVine, provided commentary on several of the essays in this post.

Haven’t started writing your essay yet? Advisors on CollegeVine also offer expert college counseling packages . You can purchase a package to get one-on-one guidance on any aspect of the college application process, including brainstorming and writing essays.

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Sophia Bush confirms relationship with Ashlyn Harris: 'The universe had been conspiring for me'

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Sophia Bush finally feels like she can breathe after coming out as queer and opening up about her long-rumored relationship with soccer star Ashlyn Harris .

"When I take stock of the last few years, I can tell you that I have never operated out of more integrity in my life. I hope that’s clear enough for everyone speculating out there," the "One Tree Hill" alum wrote Thursday in an essay for the April issue of Glamour .

Read more: Sophia Bush, soccer star Ashlyn Harris spark dating rumors after respective divorces

The 41-year-old detailed how her one-year marriage to Grant Hughes felt phony and fell apart amid her grueling fertility issues. She also explained how her recovery from that relationship led her to Harris, who simultaneously had been going through her own divorce from former teammate Ali Krieger.

Bush wrote that after her storybook wedding — which she doesn't regret — she found herself "in the depths and heartbreak of the fertility process." She kept all that private as she endured months of ultrasounds, hormone shots, blood draws that led to scar tissue in her veins and numerous egg retrievals, "while simultaneously realizing the person I had chosen to be my partner didn’t necessarily speak the same emotional language I did.”

The "Work in Progress" and "Drama Queens" podcast host said she felt something in her "seismically shift" about six months into that journey and "knew deep down that I absolutely had made a mistake," ultimately filing for divorce after about 13 months of marriage. Her separation from Hughes, an entrepreneur and real estate investor, saw Bush moving to London "to get out of our house" and doing a play to "jump-start the joy" she had been chasing. (She withdrew from "2:22 A Ghost Story" in July 2023 due to illness.)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Glamour (@glamourmag)

The “Love, Victor” and “Chicago P.D.” actor moved back to her empty home in L.A. last summer and said that an ever-expanding group of women in her life started opening up about their own issues. That group included the "kind ear" of the U.S. Women’s National Team goalkeeper, whom she'd first met in 2019. She didn't expect to find love there.

"I don’t know how else to say it other than: I didn’t see it until I saw it. And I think it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option.”

It took other people in their "safe support bubble" to point out to Bush that she and Harris would finish each other’s sentences or be deeply affected by the same things, she wrote.

Read more: Sophia Bush thinks she is one of the better Bushes

Reports about the couple's romance surfaced in October, months after they each filed for divorce. The “One Tree Hill” alum and the U.S. Women’s National Team goalkeeper reportedly went out on their first dinner date a couple of weeks prior, People reported at the time, and TMZ asserted that they were "officially a thing."

In her essay, Bush shed light on that purported first date, which she described as a 4½-hour meal that was "truly one of the most surreal experiences of my life thus far."

"I do know that for a sparkly moment I felt like maybe the universe had been conspiring for me," she wrote. But navigating the judgment she felt in the public eye was disheartening.

"The ones who said I’d left my ex because I suddenly realized I wanted to be with women — my partners have known what I’m into for as long as I have (so that’s not it, y’all, sorry!)," she wrote, noting that she didn't leave her marriage because of some random rendezvous but rather after a year of "doing the most soul-crushing work of my life."

Read more: Sophia Bush files for divorce from husband Grant Hughes after 13 months of marriage

Bush also fawned over her partner's integrity and love for her children. As for her identity, the life-long LGBTQIA+ ally described feeling at home with the queer community.

"I think I’ve always known that my sexuality exists on a spectrum. Right now I think the word that best defines it is queer," she wrote. "I can’t say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great."

Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .

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‘He Is Our Sinatra’: Lin-Manuel Miranda on Why Marc Anthony — and His New Album, ‘Muevense’ — Are So Important (EXCLUSIVE)

By Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda

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New York City is filled with Latin music icons, and legendary singer Marc Anthony and “Hamilton” / “In the Heights”/ “Encanto” composer Lin-Manuel Miranda are two in a long and illustrious legacy. With Anthony’s new album “Muevense” arriving this Friday — and him performing his new single, “Ale, Ale,” at the Latin American Music Awards tonight on Univision — Miranda took the time to pay tribute to “our Sinatra”: the man whose music, as you’ll see below, was the soundtrack to so much of his life.

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It may have been your last Spring Break with your friends, screaming “Voy a reír, voy a bailar…” at the top of your lungs. It may have been blasting “No Me Conoces” during your first heartbreak (“Y AHORA RESULTA QUE NO SOY SUFICIENTE PARA TI, WHOAAA…” you sang to that empty bedroom). Or walking down the aisle to “Vivir Lo Nuestro”/ “Nadie Como Ella,” too many classics to count.

Here’s my Marc Anthony Story. My first album was “Otra Nota,” which I purchased at Nobody Beats The Wiz with my 13th birthday money in 1993, because “Palabras Del Alma” was already so inescapable that I had to hear the rest of the album. Even as a teenager, I knew that the passion and depth in this young man’s voice was beyond anything I’d ever heard in salsa. It forced me to double down on learning to dance salsa, so that by the time “Todo A Su Tiempo” came out in 1995, I was ready to tear up the dance floor at Mayra Linares’ quinceañera with all her gorgeous friends.

I was at the New York Puerto Rican Day Parade in 1997, watching Marc Anthony on the main stage on 86th Street and 5th Avenue, when Tito Puente came by on a passing float. He pointed at Marc, jumped down from his parade float, and took to the mainstage for a blistering timbale solo on the song already in progress, a passing of the torch I’ll never forget.

I went to see Marc Anthony’s Broadway debut in “The Capeman” that same year, and sang “Adios Hermanos” with my friends at graduation.

My mother reports that after she dropped me, her youngest child, off to college in 1998, she listened to “Contra La Corriente” for a month straight. “’YO TRATO, TRATO, TRATO, PERO NO TE OLVIDO…’ Lin-Manuel, I was so depressed at our empty nest and that album got me through it.”

When my son Francisco was born, Marc’s voice was singing on our childbirth playlist: “Si te vas, si te vaaas…”

I could go on, but these notes only have so much space.

All this to say, a new Marc Anthony album is always cause for celebration, and it speaks to the timelessness and consistency of his voice and his musical collaborators that at any moment you can turn on any radio station and within the same commercial-free music block, hear a song he recorded last year next to a song he recorded 30 years ago. He is our Sinatra, and when we hear him, we also hear the echoes of all the unforgettable moments in our own lives.

And now here comes “MUEVENSE,” a new soundtrack for the next chapter in Marc’s life and ours. The blistering title track, “Muevense,” which is all over ONE CHORD, but contains a universe of syncopation and will flood all dance floors. An ex-lover classic in “Punta Cana,” which joins “No Me Conoces,” “Hasta Ayer” and “Y Hubo Alguien” in the pantheon of “You Broke Up With Me and You’ll Always Regret It.”  But “I’m Thriving” anthems, now in bachata mode! “Si Te Enamoro,” headed for your next wedding playlist immediately. “Ojala Te Duela,” a historic foray into mariachi with the great Pepe Aguilar, and confirms what we have always known: that lágrima in Marc’s voice transcends styles and musical boundaries. “En La Distancia,” by the great Colombian songwriter Fonseca, has one of the most exciting musical builds in Marc’s discography. “Ale Ale” is as close to a valedictory speech as you’ll ever hear Marc give, his “My Way.” “A Donde Vamos A Parar” is the breakup/crying on the dancefloor jam you’ve been waiting for, written by Marc’s namesake, the legendary Marco Antonio Solís. The album’s closer, “Amarte A La Antigua,” has the craziest held note into a key change you’ve ever heard, and will be a staple in our lives for years to come.

Thank you, Marc.  Every new album is a promise of more life, more music, and more memories, and “Muevense” is up there with your best. See the rest of you on the dance floor.

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Harvey Weinstein’s New York Conviction Is Overturned

The state’s top court ruled that Mr. Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood producer whose sexual abuse case incited the #MeToo movement, did not receive a fair trial. A separate 16-year sentence in California was not affected.

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Maria Cramer

Here are five takeaways from the overturned conviction.

In a 4-to-3 decision on Thursday, New York’s highest court overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges , a reversal that horrified and dismayed many of the women whose decision to speak out against Mr. Weinstein, a prominent Hollywood producer, accelerated the #MeToo movement.

The New York Court of Appeals agreed with Mr. Weinstein’s defense team that the trial judge who presided over the sex crimes case in Manhattan, Justice James Burke, made a critical error when he let prosecutors call as witnesses several women who testified that Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, even though none of those allegations had led to charges.

The women became known as Molineux witnesses, a term that refers to trial witnesses who are allowed to testify about criminal acts that the defendant has not been charged with committing. In writing for the majority, Judge Jenny Rivera said permitting such testimony in Mr. Weinstein’s case had served to wrongly “diminish defendant’s character before the jury.”

The ruling, four years after Mr. Weinstein was convicted of forcibly performing oral sex on a production assistant and of raping an actress, did not surprise many legal analysts who had questioned whether prosecutors had taken too big a risk in their efforts to win over the jury.

In its decision, the court came to the conclusion that prosecutors had done just that and, along with Justice Burke, had violated a central tenet of criminal trials: Defendants should be judged only on the charges against them.

Here are five takeaways from the court’s ruling:

The court cited “egregious errors.”

The court said the trial’s fairness had been compromised by two key prosecution strategies: the use of Molineux witnesses and the prosecutors’ disclosure that if Mr. Weinstein took the stand in his own defense, they would ask him about dozens of allegations of other crimes and boorish, frightening behavior.

Before the trial, during what is known as a Sandoval hearing, Justice Burke said he would let prosecutors question Mr. Weinstein about 28 allegations that included physically attacking his brother, threatening to cut off a colleague’s genitals with gardening shears, throwing a table of food, and screaming and cursing at hotel restaurant staff after they told him the kitchen was closed.

That threat made it impossible for Mr. Weinstein to take the stand even though he was “begging” to testify in his own defense, his lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said during oral arguments before the Court of Appeals in February.

In its majority opinion, the court agreed.

“The threat of a cross-examination highlighting these untested allegations undermined defendant’s right to testify,” Judge Rivera wrote. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”

The three dissenting judges slammed the majority.

Three judges — Madeline Singas, Anthony Cannataro and Michael J. Garcia — dissented in a pair of scathing opinions that accused the majority of continuing “a disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”

The judges said the court had ignored evidence that the Molineux witnesses had established: that Mr. Weinstein had displayed a pattern of coercion and manipulation.

Judge Singas said the ruling would make it harder to use such witnesses in future sexual assault cases.

“Men who serially sexually exploit their power over women — especially the most vulnerable groups in society — will reap the benefit of today’s decision,” she wrote.

Judge Cannataro said the additional witnesses the prosecution had presented had helped upend the still-pervasive notion that a sexual assault must involve “the stereotypical stranger in a dark alley who isolates his victim or waits for her to be alone before launching a violent assault.”

The case clearly caused tension among the court, evident in a series of back-and-forth statements between the judges, with the majority defending itself against the dissenters’ claims that the ruling weakened the ability of accusers to push their cases through the criminal court system.

“We do not ‘shut eyes to the enduring effect of rape culture on notions of consent, and intent,’” Judge Rivera wrote, referring to part of Judge Singas’s dissent. “On the contrary, consistent with our judicial role, our analysis is grounded on bedrock principles of evidence and the defendant’s constitutional right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial.”

Victims and activists are devastated but remain determined.

Dawn Dunning, one of the Molineux witnesses who testified against Mr. Weinstein, said she was asked after the ruling if she regretted testifying.

“My answer is a resounding ‘no,’” she said in a statement. “I am a stronger person for having done so, and I know that other women found strength and courage because I and other Weinstein survivors confronted him publicly. The culture has changed, and I am confident that there is no going back.”

She and others encouraged Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, to retry the case. The 2020 case was tried under Cyrus R. Vance Jr., Mr. Bragg’s predecessor. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Bragg said that he would retry the case.

Ashley Judd , the first actress to come forward with allegations against Mr. Weinstein, called the news “unfair to survivors.”

“We still live in our truth,” she said. “And we know what happened.”

Ms. Judd appeared with several other sexual assault survivors and activists on Thursday at a hastily arranged news conference on the 29th floor of the Millennium Hilton in Midtown.

Tarana Burke, the founder of #MeToo, said one of the overarching goals of the movement — to get the court system to take sexual assault cases more seriously — is “long, strategic and thoughtful.”

“The bad thing about survivors is there are so many of us,” she said. “But the good thing about survivors is that there are so many of us.”

Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in California still stands.

Mr. Weinstein, who had been serving a 23-year sentence at Mohawk Correctional Facility in upstate New York, learned about the decision after someone at the prison showed him a news report about the ruling, according to his lawyer, Mr. Aidala.

He talked to Mr. Aidala just after 10 a.m., about an hour after the ruling came down.

Mr. Aidala said Mr. Weinstein “wasn’t emotional, like crying,” but he was “very gracious, very grateful.”

Even with the conviction overturned, Mr. Weinstein is not a free man. He is still facing a 16-year sentence in California, where a jury convicted him in 2022 of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel . He was to serve that term after his New York sentence. Now, he could be transferred to California, but he will most likely be transferred from state prison to Rikers Island, the jail complex in New York City, as he waits for Mr. Bragg to decide whether to push for another trial.

… But he will soon appeal it.

After Thursday’s decision came down, Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer in California, Jennifer Bonjean, said she expected the ruling to help him when he appeals his California conviction on May 20.

A jury in Los Angeles Superior Court deadlocked on charges of sexual battery by restraint, forcible oral copulation and forcible rape in December 2022. Those charges were related to accusations brought by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker and the wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and Lauren Young, a model and screenwriter.

But the jury found Mr. Weinstein guilty on three other counts — rape, forcible oral sex and sexual penetration — involving an Italian actress who testified that he attacked her in a hotel room in 2013. The jury acquitted Mr. Weinstein of one count of sexual battery involving a massage therapist.

In that case, as in New York, prosecutors were allowed to use witnesses who accused Mr. Weinstein of sex crimes that he had not been charged with. However, the laws around such witnesses are different in California.

Jurors in the California trial were “overwhelmed with this bad character evidence that was not legitimate, that tainted the whole trial in California from our perspective,” Ms. Bonjean said.

Jodi Kantor , Jan Ransom , Chelsia Rose Marcius and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.

Claire Fahy

Lindsay Goldbrum, a lawyer who has represented a number of Weinstein’s accusers, said in a statement that the witness testimony at issue was crucial to rebutting the defense’s assertion that the sexual encounters were consensual. The ruling today “will undoubtedly deter future sexual assault victims from coming forward,” she said.

Hurubie Meko

Weinstein’s lawyer Arthur Aidala said he would be brought to a facility closer to New York City in preparation for a new case, and then “we start from scratch.”

The Harvey Weinstein Appeal Ruling, Annotated

Read the ruling from New York’s top court that overturned the 2020 conviction of Harvey Weinstein on felony sex crime charges in Manhattan, with context and explanation by New York Times journalists.

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Benjamin Weiser

What is the Court of Appeals, and how does it work?

The Court of Appeals, which handed down the Weinstein ruling on Thursday, is New York’s highest court — and thus gets the final say on cases in the state before a party may seek review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The appeals court’s seven members include a chief judge, Rowan Wilson , and six associate judges. The judges’ vote to overturn Weinstein’s conviction was 4-to-3.

In order for Harvey Weinstein to have the appeals court hear his case after he was found guilty in a Manhattan trial in 2020, he first had to appeal to an intermediate court — called the appellate division. A panel of that court unanimously upheld Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in 2022. From there, he then could pursue his case in the Court of Appeals.

According to Thursday’s ruling, two associate judges on the Court of Appeals did not participate in the Weinstein decision; they were replaced by two justices from the appellate division.

Weinstein learned about the decision after someone showed him a news report that said his conviction had been reversed, his lawyer Arthur Aidala said.

Mr. Weinstein’s criminal convictions in California still stand.

A decision by New York’s highest court to overturn the 2020 sex crimes conviction of Harvey Weinstein has upended a criminal case that helped ignite the #MeToo movement. But that conviction was just one of two secured against Mr. Weinstein in recent years.

In the other case, brought by prosecutors in Los Angeles in January 2020 , Mr. Weinstein was accused of rape and other crimes, convicted and ultimately sentenced to 16 years in prison , with the term to begin after his New York sentence. Mr. Weinstein is expected to appeal the California conviction next month, said his lawyer Jennifer Bonjean.

Ms. Bonjean added that she thinks Thursday’s decision — which found that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with but also for past behavior — will bolster the appeal in Los Angeles.

“The New York decision relates to the excessive use of other accusers — and the concept of uncharged accusers and bad acts is equally applicable in the L.A. case,” Ms. Bonjean said.

In the Los Angeles case, prosecutors called 44 witnesses, including four women who said they had been assaulted by Mr. Weinstein and were allowed to testify to show a pattern of abuse, though their accounts were not tied to the charges.

“They were overwhelmed with this bad character evidence that was not legitimate that tainted the whole trial in California from our perspective,” Ms. Bonjean said of the jurors in that case.

Ms. Bonjean, who represented Bill Cosby in the successful appeal of his sexual assault conviction, also said that the Los Angeles prosecutors erred by informing the jury that Mr. Weinstein had been convicted in New York, which might have unfairly swayed jurors.

“That turned the presumption of innocence on its head and tainted the entire trial and was even used to enhance his sentencing,” said Ms. Bonjean, who added that she expected to file an appeal in the California case on May 20.

The California prosecution in Los Angeles Superior Court focused in part on allegations that Mr. Weinstein raped a woman identified as Jane Doe 1 in a hotel room in February 2013. He was convicted in December 2022 of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object. But he was not convicted on four other counts.

At his sentencing, Mr. Weinstein pleaded for leniency, telling the judge that the case against him was not solid and did not justify a long prison term.

“I tried all my life to bring happiness to people,” Mr. Weinstein said in court. “Please don’t sentence me to life in prison. I don’t deserve it.”

Jane Manning, the director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project and a former sex crimes prosecutor, said that the appeals court decision in New York should not affect the case in Los Angeles.

“California law explicitly permits prosecutors to show that a defendant’s sexually predatory conduct is part of a pattern,” Ms. Manning said. “They explicitly permit evidence of similar crimes to be admitted in sex assault cases because they understand just how relevant this evidence is.”

Ms. Manning said that New York, on the other hand, does not have a statute that guides courts on this issue and “so it is left completely to the courts to determine what is and isn’t permissible when it comes to evidence of similar crimes.”

It was unclear on Thursday just when Weinstein would be transferred to a California prison. A spokesman for the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which runs the prison where he is now in custody, said the agency was “reviewing the court decision.”

Duncan Levin, a former New York prosecutor who was briefly part of Weinstein’s legal team, said in a statement: “This is how the court system is supposed to work: fundamental due process for everyone without fear or favor. The New York Court of Appeals adhered to the basic principles of rule of law, and that was not an easy thing to do here.”

At a news conference outside Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building, where Weinstein was convicted in 2020, Arthur Aidala, one of Weinstein’s lawyers, said that from the start his team “knew that Harvey Weinstein did not get a fair trial.”

Aidala called Judge Jenny Rivera, who wrote the decision, a “real hero for women.” The decision, he said, stated that “you can’t convict someone based on their entire life.”

Weinstein will now be able to return to court and tell his side without having “so much baggage” from his past divulged to the jury, Aidala said. “He’s been dying to tell his story from Day 1,” he said.

Weinstein is slated to appeal his California conviction on May 20, according to his lawyer Jennifer Bonjean, who said that she expected that today’s ruling would bolster his appeal in that case. She said jurors were “overwhelmed with this bad character evidence that was not legitimate, that tainted the whole trial in California from our perspective.”

The Model Alliance, a labor rights group focused on young women in the fashion industry, criticized the ruling in a news conference on Zoom. Carré Otis, a model who is on the group’s board, described herself as “sickened” by the decision. “As an advocate, I’m fired up,” she added.

Sara Ziff, the executive director of the Model Alliance, called on lawmakers in Albany to pass the Fashion Workers Act, which would provide labor protections for models, before the end of the legislative session on June 6. “While today’s news is devastating, it only strengthens our commitment to reforming industries predominantly made up of young women,” she said.

In their dissents, three judges offer sharp critiques of the majority’s decision.

In a pair of scathing opinions, three judges on the New York Court of Appeals who dissented in the court’s ruling to overturn Harvey Weinstein’s conviction accused the majority of continuing “a disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”

Madeline Singas, one of the dissenting judges, said the majority of the court had ignored the evidence that showed Mr. Weinstein’s affinity for “manipulation and premeditation.”

Worse, she wrote, the court had made it harder for victims to hold their assailants accountable in future cases.

“Men who serially sexually exploit their power over women — especially the most vulnerable groups in society — will reap the benefit of today’s decision,” Judge Singas wrote.

She joined Judges Anthony Cannataro and Michael J. Garcia in the dissent. Judge Garcia did not write his own opinion, but agreed with the other two dissenting judges.

In his dissent, Judge Cannataro said that the additional witnesses the prosecution presented — who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him — had been vital to show Mr. Weinstein’s pattern of manipulation and coercion.

Their testimony, he wrote, helped upend the still-pervasive notion that a sexual assault must involve “the stereotypical stranger in a dark alley who isolates his victim or waits for her to be alone before launching a violent assault.”

In the Manhattan trial, Justice James Burke was careful in his decision to let prosecutors present evidence that showed that more “complex psychological and sociological dynamics” were at play, Judge Cannataro wrote.

The decision to overturn the conviction “represents an unfortunate step backward from recent advances in our understanding of how sex crimes are perpetrated and why victims sometimes respond in seemingly counterintuitive ways,” Judge Cannataro wrote.

Judge Singas said that the witness testimony of the additional women, who described their disgust and horror at Mr. Weinstein’s advances, had made it clearer to the jury that the former producer had to have known that he did not have the women’s consent.

“Their testimony explained the idiosyncrasies of the entertainment industry that allow assaults to be perpetrated by influential and powerful men against young and relatively powerless aspiring actresses,” Judge Singas wrote.

The majority appeared to take umbrage with the fierce statements of the dissenting judges, defending their ruling in numerous footnotes and throughout the opinion, a back-and-forth that suggested the decision had given rise to considerable tension among the judges.

Judge Jenny Rivera, who wrote for the majority, said Judge Singas “misconstrues” their analysis of why the additional witnesses were not needed to combat “rape myths.”

She pushed back on Judge Singas’s assertions that the court had made it harder for future victims to have their cases prosecuted, calling them “exaggerated claims.”

Weinstein’s team is scheduled to hold a news conference at 1:30 p.m. at the park across the street from Manhattan’s Criminal Courts building, where the trial of Donald J. Trump is underway inside. The area is surrounded by security and camera banks of press.

Maia Coleman

Sarah Ann Masse, an actress who in 2017 accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her and who has founded an organization supporting survivors of sexual abuse in Hollywood, said in a statement that today’s decision reflects a broader failure of the justice system to support survivors.

“Abusers are given chance after chance to get back to their ‘normal lives’ while survivors continue to suffer from a lack of support, prolonged trauma, chronic illness, mental health struggles, economic harm and various forms of retaliation,” she said.

Reached by phone, Donna Rotunno, Weinstein’s lead trial attorney in New York, lauded the court’s decision. “From Day 1 of this I have said they were prosecuting him for sins, not crimes,” she said. “I think it’s bigger than Weinstein; this speaks to our justice system as a whole. The court ruling says to prosecutors: Winning at all costs is not your job. Your job is to put on a fair trial.”

Chelsia Rose Marcius

Fatima Goss Graves, the chief executive of the National Women’s Law Center, said at a news conference in Manhattan that today’s decision would only invigorate the #MeToo movement. “One well-known case does not define this movement,” she said.

Despite their visibly deep disappointment about today’s decision, Judd, Burke and Graves are composed and smiling. All said they took solace in their strong bond. Burke said movements like #MeToo are “long, strategic and thoughtful.” She added: “The bad thing about survivors is there are so many of us. But the good thing about survivors is that there are so many of us.”

Weinstein’s accusers express fury and disappointment over the court’s ruling.

Several women who have accused Harvey Weinstein of sex crimes or harassment expressed a range of emotions on Thursday morning after New York’s highest court overturned Mr. Weinstein’s 2020 conviction.

It’s “a terrible reminder that victims of sexual assault just don’t get justice,” said Katherine Kendall , an actress who accused Mr. Weinstein of luring her to what she believed would be a work discussion in 1993. Instead, she said, he chased her around his New York apartment while he was nude. “I’m completely let down by the justice system right now,” she added. “I’m sort of flabbergasted.”

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez , a Filipino Italian model, had accused Mr. Weinstein of grabbing her breasts and putting his hands up her skirt in 2015 during a business meeting at his office in Manhattan, but the Manhattan district attorney’s office decided not to charge him .

“If the D.A. had taken my case seriously in 2015, we wouldn’t be here,” Ms. Battilana Gutierrez said on Thursday. “This is an ongoing failure of the justice system — and the courts — to take survivors seriously and to protect our interests.”

Amber Tamblyn, an actress, writer and director who has been outspoken during the #MeToo movement , was flooded with anger when she learned of Thursday’s decision, calling it “a loss to the entire community of women who put their lives and careers on the line to speak out.”

Tomi-Ann Roberts, a professor of psychology at Colorado College, said the ruling infuriated her but did not shock her. She had accused Mr. Weinstein of sexually harassing her during an encounter at a hotel in 1984 that she believed was a business meeting.

“The only thing I can hope with this is that it re-energizes the #MeToo movement to demand that the criminal and civil justice systems do better at holding perpetrators accountable for this range of activities that are all degrading and all should be illegal,” said Dr. Roberts, whose research focuses on the consequences of sexual objectification.

Ms. Kendall added that sexual assault victims “who go up against powerful men rarely get justice.”

“But the important thing is that we do not stop speaking out,” she said. “Our culture needs to keep supporting silence breakers.”

Jodi Kantor , Jan Ransom and Maria Cramer contributed reporting.

Michael Osgood, the former head of the New York Police Department’s special victims division, who led a team of 25 detectives in the Weinstein investigation, said that the decision today was a result of missteps by the former Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance. “We built a rock-solid case,” he said of the 2015 case involving the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez. “Harvey Weinstein was able to penetrate the district attorney’s office and cover that assault up.”

The actress Ashley Judd is speaking now at a news conference in Manhattan. This morning, she said, she heard the news from my colleague Jodi Kantor. Judd said she was stunned. “This is what it's like to be a woman in America,”she said, “living with male entitlement to our bodies.”

Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, said this news conference was pulled together quickly in response to the ruling. Many people, she said, had thought that the original verdict represented a change in how the justice system operates. “This moment makes it feel like we were wrong.”

Nicole Hong

The appeals court agreed with Weinstein that the trial judge violated his right to testify in his own defense. The trial judge had ruled that if Weinstein took the stand, prosecutors would be allowed to question him about a long history of bad behavior, including allegations that he threw food at an employee and punched his brother at a business meeting. The appeals ruling said this “impermissibly” affected Weinstein’s decision not to testify at trial.

William Rashbaum

Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the former Manhattan district attorney who oversaw the investigation and prosecution of Weinstein, said in a lengthy statement that he was “shocked” by the decision, which he said “did not advance justice.”

Of Weinstein’s victims, he said, “I am deeply grateful to and humbled by the survivors who came forward in the brightest glare of a public courtroom to tell their stories at great personal cost and trauma,” adding, “The judicial system, in my opinion, has let them down today.”

Vance, noting that Weinstein’s conviction was previously upheld by a lower appeals court in “a thoughtful and unanimous opinion,” said the witness testimony at issue “was fair and necessary to explain to the jury how and why these women were repeatedly victimized.” He also said those witnesses were just a fraction of the women victimized by Weinstein over years of abuse.

The model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who had accused Weinstein of groping her breast and putting his hand up her skirt, said in a statement: “If the D.A. had taken my case seriously in 2015, we wouldn’t be here. This is an ongoing failure of the justice system — and the courts — to take survivors seriously and to protect our interests.”

Justice Madeline Singas wrote a fiery dissent that accused the court of making it more difficult for victims to seek justice against their assailants. “Men who serially sexually exploit their power over women — especially the most vulnerable groups in society — will reap the benefit of today’s decision,” she wrote.

Justice Anthony Cannataro, who also dissented, wrote that the additional witnesses the prosecution presented were vital to show Weinstein’s pattern of manipulation and coercion. Their testimony helped upend the still pervasive notion that a sexual assault must involve “the stereotypical stranger in a dark alley who isolates his victim or waits for her to be alone before launching a violent assault.”

Weinstein has been held in semi-protective custody at Mohawk Correctional Facility east of Syracuse, where he has spent his days reading and studying the law, his spokesman said.

Weinstein, who has diabetes, eye problems and heart issues, has used a walker in prison and was housed in a medical unit, his spokesman said. “He’s been to the hospital for his eye issues,” said the spokesman, Juda Engelmayer. “He has been going through bouts of difficulty.”

Testimony by these witnesses was a key part of Weinstein’s appeal argument.

Central to the decision to overturn the conviction of Harvey Weinstein was something called “Molineux witnesses.” That term refers to witnesses in a trial who are allowed to testify about criminal acts that the defendant has not been charged with committing.

During the trial, prosecutors sought to persuade jurors that Mr. Weinstein had a long history of using his prominence as a Hollywood producer to lure young women to hotel rooms and sexually assault them.

They did this by calling other women to the stand who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, including Dawn Dunning, Tarale Wulff and Lauren Young . Mr. Weinstein was not charged with assaulting those women, but Justice James Burke allowed them to appear for the prosecution as Molineux witnesses, also known as “prior bad act” witnesses.

The legal standard for prior bad acts in New York State dates back to the case of a chemist named Roland B. Molineux , who was convicted in 1900 of sending a bottle full of cyanide to the director of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club , with whom he had a personal feud. The cyanide killed a woman who was living with the club director and took the poison, believing it was a medicine.

During Mr. Molineux’s trial, prosecutors presented evidence that he had previously poisoned another rival in the same manner, with a mailed tin of poison masquerading as medicine. He was never charged with the earlier crime.

A year later, the Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in a landmark decision that said the state could not present evidence about a defendant’s other alleged crimes. Jurors, the court ruled, would believe a defendant “was guilty of the crime charged because he had committed other, similar crimes in the past.”

But exceptions to the ruling were laid out. For instance, a judge could admit such evidence to establish a motive for the crime being tried, to prove the crime wasn’t an innocent mistake or to establish a common scheme or plan.

Before letting the evidence in, the judge would have to weigh the extent to which the evidence helped to prove that the crime was part of a pattern, versus how prejudicial the effect on the jury would be, the court decided.

But those are both highly subjective judgments, according to legal experts. And that leaves defendants like Mr. Weinstein ample ground to challenge a guilty verdict in higher courts.

Jonah Bromwich

A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a statement: “We will do everything in our power to retry this case, and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of sexual assault.”

A spokesman for Weinstein said the lawyers will respond to the New York Court of Appeals decision at 1:30 p.m. on the steps of the criminal courthouse at 100 Centre Street.

Here’s a timeline of Weinstein’s New York case.

March 27, 2015 : Prosecutors in Manhattan decline to prosecute Harvey Weinstein after a Filipino Italian model, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, tells the police that Mr. Weinstein groped her breast and slid his hand up her skirt during a business meeting at his office in Manhattan. The Manhattan district attorney at the time, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., reaches the decision despite a secret recording obtained by Ms. Battilana Gutierrez in which Mr. Weinstein can be heard apologizing and offering what seems like an admission.

Oct. 5, 2017 : Investigations by The New York Times and The New Yorker reveal accusations that Mr. Weinstein mistreated women and that his company covered it up.

March 19, 2018 : Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York orders a review of the decision not to charge Mr. Weinstein in 2015, calling Mr. Vance’s decision-making into question.

April 25, 2018 : Mr. Vance assigns a new prosecutor to lead the investigation.

May 25, 2018 : Mr. Weinstein surrenders to the police after being indicted on charges of rape and criminal sexual act. The rape charge stems from an alleged assault on an aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, at a Manhattan hotel in 2013. The criminal sexual act charge involves Lucia Evans, a marketing executive who told investigators that Mr. Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on him during a meeting in his office in 2004.

July 2, 2018 : Prosecutors add charges against Mr. Weinstein related to accusations that he forced oral sex on Miriam Haley, a former production assistant on the television show “Project Runway,” in his Manhattan apartment in July 2006.

Oct. 11, 2018 : A judge dismisses the forcible oral sex charge against Mr. Weinstein involving Ms. Evans after prosecutors acknowledge that the lead detective in the case withheld pertinent information that a witness had cast doubt on Ms. Evans’s account.

Aug. 26, 2019 : Prosecutors obtain a new indictment against Mr. Weinstein, allowing them to call as a witness Annabella Sciorra, an actress who said that Mr. Weinstein raped her at her Manhattan apartment in 1993 or 1994.

Jan. 6, 2020 : Mr. Weinstein is indicted in Los Angeles, where he is accused of raping one woman and groping and masturbating in front of a second within two days in February 2013. The California charges are filed the same day that the legal parties in Mr. Weinstein’s New York trial first gather in Manhattan to discuss jury selection and other legal matters.

Feb. 18, 2020 : After a monthlong trial in which they hear testimony from Ms. Sciorra, Ms. Haley and Ms. Mann, among other people, jurors in New York began deliberations.

Feb. 24, 2020 : The jury, consisting of five men and seven women, finds Mr. Weinstein guilty of rape and criminal sexual act but acquits him on three other counts, including the two most serious charges against him: being a sexual predator.

March 11, 2020 : Mr. Weinstein is sentenced to 23 years in prison. His first stop in New York’s penal system is the notorious Rikers Island jail complex where he becomes inmate No. 3102000153.

April 10, 2020 : Prosecutors in California add a charge against Mr. Weinstein, alleging that he committed an assault at a Beverly Hills hotel in May 2010.

April 5, 2021 : Mr. Weinstein appeals his New York conviction, saying several women who had accused him of sexual assault should not have been allowed to testify.

June 2, 2022 : A New York appeals court upholds Mr. Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crimes in a unanimous decision.

Dec. 19, 2022 : After a trial that began in October 2022, jurors in Los Angeles return a mixed verdict, finding Mr. Weinstein guilty of raping and sexually assaulting an actress in 2013, but not guilty of one other charge. They are unable to reach a decision on three additional counts.

Feb. 23, 2023 : Mr. Weinstein is sentenced to 16 years in prison in the Los Angeles case, with that prison term to begin after he serves his time in New York.

April 25, 2024 : New York’s highest court overturns the 2020 conviction, ruling that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with, but instead for much of his past behavior.

Jodi Kantor

Jodi Kantor has been reporting on Harvey Weinstein since 2017, when she and Megan Twohey revealed decades of abuse allegations against him.

News analysis

Harvey Weinstein’s conviction was fragile from the start.

The overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s New York sex crimes conviction on Thursday morning may feel like a shocking reversal, but the criminal case against him has been fragile since the day it was filed. Prosecutors moved it forward with risky, boundary-pushing bets. New York’s top judges, many of them female, have held rounds of pained debates over whether his conviction was clean.

“I’m not shocked,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former Manhattan prosecutor who is now a law professor at Northwestern, in an interview. The issue of whether Mr. Weinstein’s trial was fair “is a really close question that could have gone either way.”

Outside the justice system, evidence of Mr. Weinstein’s sexual misconduct is overwhelming. After The New York Times revealed allegations of abuse by the producer in 2017, nearly 100 women came forward with accounts of pressure and manipulation by Mr. Weinstein. Their stories sparked the global #MeToo reckoning.

But while Mr. Weinstein’s alleged victims could fill an entire courtroom, few of them could stand at the center of a New York criminal trial. Many of the horror stories were about sexual harassment, which is a civil violation, not a criminal one. Some were from out of state, especially California. Others fell beyond the statute of limitations. One of the original accusers was dropped from the trial because of allegations of police misconduct.

Manhattan prosecutors, under pressure for not pursuing charges earlier, made a series of gambles.

First, they proceeded with a trial based on only two victims, who accused him of sexually assaulting them but also admitted to having consensual sex with him at other times — a combination that many experts say is too messy to win convictions . To prove their case against Mr. Weinstein, who denies all allegations of non-consensual sex, the prosecutors had little concrete evidence.

So to persuade the jury, the lawyers turned to a controversial strategy that would ultimately lead to the conviction’s undoing. They put additional women with accounts of abuse by Mr. Weinstein — so-called Molineux witnesses — on the stand to establish a pattern of predation. The decision seemed apt for the moment: In a legal echo of the #MeToo movement, Mr. Weinstein was forced to face a chorus of testimony from multiple women.

The women’s testimony was searing, and when Mr. Weinstein was convicted in 2020, and then sentenced to 23 years in prison, it looked like the prosecutors had expanded the possibilities for holding sex offenders accountable.

“I did it for all of us,” Dawn Dunning , who served as a supporting witness in the trial, said in an interview afterward. “I did it for the women who couldn’t testify. I couldn’t not do it.”

But because New York law is open to interpretation on when those witnesses are allowed, the move risked violating a cardinal rule of criminal trials: Defendants must be judged on the acts they are being charged with.

That became the main basis for Mr. Weinstein’s repeated appeals of his conviction. For years, his lawyers have argued that his trial was fundamentally unfair, because it included witnesses who fell outside the scope of the charges. In addition to the alleged sexual assault victims, prosecutors brought in character witnesses who portrayed Mr. Weinstein as a capricious, cruel figure.

In 2022, a New York appeals court dismissed those concerns and upheld his conviction, after a vigorous debate by the judges. They wrote that the testimony from the additional witnesses had been instrumental in showing that the producer did not see his victims as “romantic partners or friends,” but that “his goal at all times was to position the women in such a way that he could have sex with them, and that whether the women consented or not was irrelevant to him.”

This February, when New York’s highest court heard the producer’s last-chance appeal, the proceedings did not garner much attention . But they felt quietly dramatic: Seven of the state’s highest judges, four of them women, were debating whether the man whose alleged offenses formed the cornerstone of the #MeToo movement had been treated fairly in court.

Today the court decided, with a majority that included three of those female judges, to throw out the conviction and order a new trial. Mr. Weinstein remains convicted in California and could be moved to prison there.

“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the judges wrote in their decision on Thursday.

“No person accused of illegality may be judged on proof of uncharged crimes that serve only to establish the accused’s propensity for criminal behavior,” the opinion continued.

But the decision landed by the slimmest of majorities: 4 to 3, with stinging dissents from judges who said they feared the implications of the court’s ruling. “The majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability,” Judge Madeline Singas wrote, adding that witness rules had evolved to be more flexible. “By ignoring the legal and practical realities of proving a lack of consent, the majority has crafted a naive narrative.”

Reached by phone a few minutes after the court shared its decision, Ashley Judd, the first actress to come forward with allegations against Mr. Weinstein, was unwavering in her own judgment. “That is unfair to survivors,” she said of the ruling.

The heated back-and-forth from the New York judges, and the early reaction to the decision, launched fresh debate about whether the ground rules for sexual misconduct convictions need to be updated.

“The #MeToo movement showed how important it is to have accounts from multiple accusers,” Ms. Turkeheimer said. But witness rules — which are strict for a reason — can leave courtrooms an “alternate universe in which evidence relevant to sex crimes is often kept from the jury.”

“There’s a tension at the heart of it,” she said, “and prosecution in the #MeToo era will continue to deal with this dilemma.”

Jonah E. Bromwich ,  Maria Cramer and Jan Ransom

Here’s the latest on the reversal of Weinstein’s conviction.

New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges , a staggering reversal in the foundational case of the #MeToo era.

In a 4-3 decision , the New York Court of Appeals found that the trial judge who presided over Mr. Weinstein’s case, Justice James M. Burke, had made a crucial mistake, allowing prosecutors to call as witnesses a series of women who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them — but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him.

Citing that decision and others it identified as errors, the appeals court determined that Mr. Weinstein, who as a movie producer had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, had not received a fair trial.

The ruling does not mean Mr. Weinstein, 72, who is being held in semi-protective custody in an upstate New York prison, is a free man. He was also sentenced in 2022 to 16 years in prison in California after he was convicted of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel , and could now be sent to California to continue his sentence on the convictions there, according to his spokesman.

When reached by phone, Arthur Aidala, Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer, praised the appeals court “for upholding the most basic principles that a criminal defendant should have in a trial.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office said, “We will do everything in our power to retry this case and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of sexual assault.”

Mr. Weinstein was accused of sexual misconduct by more than 100 women ; in New York, he was convicted in 2020 of assaulting two of them. Thursday’s appeals decision underscores the legal system’s difficulty in delivering redress to those who say they have been the victims of sex crimes.

Here’s what else to know:

The decision was disappointing for Mr. Weinstein’s accusers and supporters of the #MeToo movement. Jane Manning, the director of the Women’s Equal Justice project, called it “a shocking and disheartening day for survivors of sexual assault,” and said it “shows how much more work we all have to do to bring the ideals of the #MeToo movement forward.”

In a dissent, Judge Anthony Cannataro wrote that the additional witnesses — known as Molineux witnesses — presented by the prosecution were vital to show Mr. Weinstein’s pattern of manipulation and coercion. Read more about what the three dissenting justices wrote .

Mr. Weinstein, who has diabetes, eye problems and heart issues, has used a walker in prison and was housed in a medical unit at Mohawk Correctional Facility east of Syracuse, N.Y., according to Juda Engelmayer, his spokesman. “He’s been to the hospital for his eye issues,” the spokesman said. “He has been going through bouts of difficulty.”

Mr. Weinstein is slated to appeal his California conviction on May 20, according to his lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean. She said she expected Thursday’s ruling to bolster his appeal in the Los Angeles case. Read more about the case in California .

Reports of Mr. Weinstein having sexually abused women appeared in The New York Times in the fall of 2017. Their stories ignited what would become known as the #MeToo movement, a global repudiation of sexual misconduct by powerful men.