The Universe
Galaxies, gardens, gorillas, and gnomes,
what a place it is, that we call home
LATEST STORIES
It’s big, black and mostly empty. But it is still full of enormous colour and wonder. Let’s dive in to our Universe.Â
A very famous image of the tracing paths left behind by high speed particles in an experimental collision in the Big European Bubble Chamber in the 1960s. A window into a crazy, violent and colorful world. Further details here.
The story of our Universe...
Our Universe is a weird place. Looking up at the night sky, it almost feels like you could reach out and brush the stars with the back of your hand. It seems like our Solar System is right at the center of things.Â
We are not. Our Sun is a small, but respectable star, off in one arm of one tiny galaxy, the Milky Way. Even with our fastest rockets, it takes us months to get to Mars. The closest stars are lifetimes away. The center of our galaxy, thousands of times further again.Â
Our Universe is mostly empty space. But it is massive. So it’s still full of billions of planets and stars and galaxies like ours. And they are all changing – slowly being born and dying, on time scales millions of times longer than the entirety of human civilization.Â
But despite this, our bit of the Universe seems to be incredibly unique. Nowhere else seems to be as perfect for life – let alone a civilization capable of traveling into space. However, our Universe is full of all sorts of other weird and wonderful things: blindingly bright, giant, spinning, pulsing stars, black holes so massive they are consuming galaxies and nebulas as breath-taking as any artwork humans have ever created.Â
The Universe is incredibly big, incredibly empty, full of incredible things and constantly changing at an incredibly slow rate. And despite there being millions of places like us, we seem to be unique. If you were a person, thousands of years ago, looking up at the sky and someone told you what was out there, you would not have believed them. The Universe is so weird. It’s time we all knew a bit more about it. Let’s dive in.Â
Image of the Andromeda galaxy, the closest galaxy to our galaxy, the Milky Way by D Dayad. It’s beautiful. Further details here.
Our Earth
Our Solar System
Our Galaxy
Many Galaxies
Our Universe
(galactic filaments)
Our Universe: A formal introduction
We live on the planet Earth, which orbits our sun, along with eight other planets and many asteroids.Â
There are other stars near us, which we can see at night. They come in many different types, white and red dwarfs or giants, some even have their own planets.
The 200 billion stars around us form our galaxy which we call the ‘Milky Way’. The Milky Way is a spinning spiral disk, and we are just on the inside of one of the longer arms. We don’t have any good pictures of it, because we sit right in the middle of it so they are hard to take. But we know what shape it is and we have some good pictures of some other similarly shaped galaxies. The long streak of stars we see at night are the stars in one arm of the Milky Way.
There are an enormous number of galaxies in the Universe. On a dark night, you can see a few of them, but they are much much further away than the nearby planets and stars. So they just look like pinpricks or dimly glowing dust.Â
We don’t know how many other galaxies are out there. It’s more than 200 billion, probably trillions. Every time we point a telescope at some sky, we seem to find more. Weirdly, they are spread out almost perfectly evenly across the Universe like a thin soup – there isn’t a ‘central clump’ like in a galaxy or a solar system.Â
The biggest structures in our Universe are ‘galactic filaments’ – long strands of clusters of galaxies that form a large web across the Universe. We don’t have any good pictures of these, they are just too big, but we can visualize them by combining lots of smaller pictures together. However, they are very thin and many galaxies live outside them in the galactic soup that makes up our Universe.
It’s all very weird. Let’s dive in.Â
The famous 2014 Hubble Ultra-Deep field image by NASA. The image was produced by just pointing a powerful telescope at a dark patch of sky and seeing what was there. As you can see, there was a lot there. Further details here.
Our Universe: A timeline
The famous “Earthrise” image, a picture of the Earth rising from the surface of the moon taken by Astronaut Frank Borman on Apollo 8, Christmas Eve, December 24, 1986. Further details here.
A high resolution image of the moon by G H Revera. Further details here.
the Universe: PLACES of interest
Our Universe is a big place. And we haven’t seen much of it. So you’ve probably got some questions.
What does space smell like? Is it hot or is it cold?
What is dark matter? Sounds mysterious...
So the Universe is big? Where are we?
What is "dark energy"? Do astronomers need a flashlight?
The famous “Pillars of Creation”, towering pillars of cosmic dust and gas at the heart of the Eagle Nebula taken by NASA. Further details here.
More from our universe
