The discoveries affirm that Earth is not the center of the Universe—we’ve known that since Copernicus and Galileo—but just how far from the center has been hard to imagine. The tiny blue speck we call home is proportionately no more than that, a mote of stardust near the edge of our galaxy among a hundred billion or more galaxies in the universe. It occupies just one position in a continuum of planets, moons, and other planetlike heavenly bodies that we have just begun to understand. It would be becoming of us to speak modestly of our status in the cosmos.
