The Universe, Up Close
How big, how far, how strange How Big Is Space? · The Life of a Star · Black Holes · The Milky Way · How We Explore · Are We Alone?. The light from most stars you can see left them before you were born — space is a time machine you look at every clear night.
Ages 11–13
What's inside
How Big Is Space? — distances too big to imagine
Space is bigger than your brain is built to picture — so big that ordinary numbers give up. The distances between stars are so huge that even light, the fastest thing there is, takes years to cross them. To cope, astronomers stopped using kilometres and invented a new ruler: the light-year, the distance light travels in one whole year, about nine trillion kilometres.
The Life of a Star — how stars are born and die
A star is a colossal ball of glowing gas, squeezing hydrogen together in its core to make light and heat — and just like living things, stars have a life story. They are born, they shine for an unbelievably long time, and eventually they run out of fuel and die. The really wild part is what happens when the biggest ones go.
Black Holes — where nothing escapes
A black hole is the strangest object in all of space: a place where gravity has become so unbelievably powerful that nothing at all can escape it — not a rocket, not a planet, not even light itself. That last part is why it's black. It's not a hole in the floor of space; it's a spot where so much mass is crammed into so little room that reality bends around it.
The Milky Way — our home among the stars
Stars aren't scattered randomly through space — they gather into gigantic swirling cities called galaxies, each holding hundreds of billions of them, bound together by gravity. Our own galaxy is called the Milky Way, and everything you have ever seen in the night sky lives inside it. And the Milky Way is just one of trillions.
How We Explore — telescopes, rovers and probes
Space is so hostile and so far away that exploring it is one of the hardest things humans have ever tried. There's no air to breathe, deadly radiation, and distances that take years to cross. So we've become brilliantly clever about it, using a whole toolkit — from telescopes that never leave the ground to robots that live their whole lives on other worlds.
Are We Alone? — the search for life out there
It's the biggest question a person can ask: in all this vastness, is there anybody else? For thousands of years it was pure imagination. But now, for the first time in history, it has become a real science, with telescopes and probes actually searching — and the answer, whichever way it goes, will change how we see ourselves forever.
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