Eight planets, two trillion galaxies, and one pale blue dot. How well do you know the universe you live in?
10 questions that go from our solar system to the edge of what we can see. Planets, stars, black holes, telescopes, and the missions that got us there. No jargon, just the universe.
Astronomy is the study of everything beyond Earth's atmosphere. It is humanity's oldest natural science, with records of celestial observations dating back over 5,000 years. From Babylonian star catalogues to the James Webb Space Telescope, the scale of what we can observe has grown from the naked-eye planets to galaxies forming less than 400 million years after the Big Bang.
The observable universe contains an estimated two trillion galaxies, each home to hundreds of billions of stars. Our Sun is just one of roughly 200 billion stars in the Milky Way. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope produced the first image of a black hole. In 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope delivered the deepest infrared images of the universe ever captured. We are living in a golden age of space discovery.