Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Series)

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

But high-mass stars fortuitously explode, scattering their chemically enriched guts throughout the galaxy. After nine billion years of such enrichment, in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster) in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born.

what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a superintelligent alien species?

People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

Further analysis of the Sun’s spectrum revealed the signature of an element that had no known counterpart on Earth. Being of the Sun, the new substance was given a name derived from the Greek word helios (“the Sun”), and was only later discovered in the lab. Thus, helium became the first and only element in the chemist’s Periodic Table to be discovered someplace other than Earth.

In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

Our pair of nearest-neighbor galaxies, 180,000 light-years distant, are both small and irregularly shaped. Ferdinand Magellan’s ship’s log identified these cosmic objects during his famous round-the-world voyage of 1519. In his honor, we call them the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and they are visible primarily from the Southern Hemisphere as a pair of cloudlike splotches on the sky, parked beyond the stars.