To The Stars : The Universe
It is 13.7 billion years old, 45 billion light years across and filled with 100 billion galaxies - each containing hundreds of billions of stars - the Universe as revealed by modern science is dazzling in beauty. But, paradoxically, as our knowledge of the Universe has expanded, so the division between us and the cosmos has melted away. The Universe may turn out to be infinite in extent and full of alien worlds beyond imagination, but current scientific thinking suggests that we need it all in order to exist. Without the stars, there would be no ingredients to build us. The story of the Universe is therefore our story; tracing our origins back beyond the dawn of man, beyond the origin of life on Earth, and even beyond the formation of Earth itself; back to events - perhaps inevitable, perhaps chance ones - that occurred less than a billionth of a second after the Universe began. On Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8 passed into the darkness behind the Moon, and Fr...