Browsing: Lens_matter

It’s been just over two decades since astronomers announced the first discoveries of exoplanets—planets orbiting stars other than the sun—and their progress in the intervening years has been so routinely remarkable its recitation now seems mundane: There are now thousands of cataloged exoplanets, and hundreds of billions more probably await discovery in the Milky Way […]

How our view of the universe, and ourselves, is changing.

When Copernicus told us that Earth is not the center of the universe, we collectively cried, “Oh, no!,” and have spent the past 470 years fanning ourselves silly, trying to recover from the blow to our species’ ego. So goes the mythology of the Copernican Revolution. But it’s not true. The center of the universe […]

Our insignificance, and significance, on a cosmic scale