The illustration below is not a drawing; it’s a photograph taken by the Hubble telescope in orbit, showing a deeper image of the sky than any seen previously with the most powerful of our telescopes; seen with the naked eye, it would be a minute piece of extremely black sky. Through the Hubble telescope a dusting of vastly distant dots appears. Each black dot in the image is a galaxy containing a hundred billion suns similar to ours. In the past few years it has been observed that the majority of these suns are orbited by planets. There are therefore in the universe thousands of billions of
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