Now for the bigger picture

Let’s take a moment to Think Big. We live on a spiral arm of a galaxy accommodating at least 100 billion stars and – as scientists now believe – countless billions of planets, many of them possibly habitable. There could be as many as 2 trillion galaxies in the observable Universe.

At the Milky Way’s centre, about 26 million light years from where we’re about to set up our first telescope, is a ravenous monster called Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole with more than 4 million times the mass of our Sun. How ravenous? For starters, it eats whole stars for breakfast, and it’s getting greedier by the day.

That’s just our neighbourhood. Elsewhere in our boundless Universe are objects that shoot death rays and gush fountains of antimatter particles, unimaginably dense neutron stars that rotate 700 times a second (would you believe a sugar-cube-sized chunk would weigh 100 million tonnes on Earth?)… and much, much more. If you are feeling especially brave, you might want to explore theories of multiple universes, a detour that requires a healthy imagination and – from a purely personal perspective – several glasses of the good stuff.