Is our universe comforting? Serene, beautiful, vast and so very old, the night sky makes some people feel happy. Others are left feeling small, insignificant and deeply alone.
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Telescope captures mind-boggling twinkle
Is our universe comforting? Serene, beautiful, vast and so very old, the night sky makes some people feel happy. Others are left feeling small, insignificant and deeply alone.
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The Hubble Space Telescope's latest discovery might be the most amazing yet. It does not look very promising. It is just a pale purple blob in a long line of bright red light.
But this blob is the most distant star we have ever seen. Its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us. Astronomers have named it Earendel.
This discovery is an amazing one. But it also reveals just how mind-bogglingly enormous the universe is - and how small we are.
It is at least 93 billion light-years across. And it is growing. There are approximately one hundred quintillion - or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - stars. And the parts of the universe we see only make up 4% of it. The rest is invisible.
People have been fascinated by space for thousands of years. Vincent van Gogh wrote: "The sky of the stars makes me dream".
Plato saw space as a gateway to a higher world. He wrote: "Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another." Christianity places heaven beyond the stars. Others have taken comfort in the way the universe seems to be ordered.
Yet the universe is so big, it makes us feel like tiny specks. The entire Earth makes up just 0.0003% of the total mass of the solar system.
Science fiction writer HP Lovecraft wrote: "The oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown". Few things are more unknown than space.
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Is our universe comforting?
Yes: When we are stressed or suffering, thinking about the bigger picture often helps. And there is none bigger than the universe: a mysterious mass whose beauty puts our problems into perspective.
No: Feeling alone and insignificant on Earth is bad enough. The knowledge that humankind adds up to less than a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things is deeply disturbing. It should make us question everything we hold important.
Or... The universe can fill us with awe or alarm, delight or discomfort, peace or panic. But all of these feelings come from us. In our day to day lives, the universe is just a blank canvas.
Keywords
12.9 billion years - For context, the Big Bang itself appeared 13.8 billion years ago.
Earendel - A man's name in Old English, meaning rising star.
Plato - One of the most important Ancient Greek philosophers.
HP Lovecraft - An American writer of the early 20th Century whose stories often depict people driven to insanity by discovering just how insignificant humans are compared to the cosmos.
Telescope captures mind-boggling twinkle
Glossary
12.9 billion years - For context, the Big Bang itself appeared 13.8 billion years ago.
Earendel - A man’s name in Old English, meaning rising star.
Plato - One of the most important Ancient Greek philosophers.
HP Lovecraft - An American writer of the early 20th Century whose stories often depict people driven to insanity by discovering just how insignificant humans are compared to the cosmos.