You Are a Universe of Stories

Inside your own night sky are untold tales of love and wisdom

Astronomers, in 1996, attempted a fascinating experiment – something that had never been tried before. They pointed the most powerful telescope in the world, the Hubble space telescope, into a part of the sky that was well-known for being completely empty — a patch of the universe long-assumed to be devoid of even single planet or star.

The experiment was a risky one, especially since time on the Hubble telescope was expensive. Indeed, there were many highly respected scientists, at the time, who questioned whether “looking at nothing” was a good use of time and resources.

Still, the experiment proceeded.

When the lens of the telescope was finally closed, 10 days later, and the images recorded from deep space were processed, more than 3,000 galaxies had been detected, each galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars.

Let me say it again: hundreds of billions of stars.

Eight years later, in 2004, astronomers decided to perform the experiment again, choosing a different patch of sky to point their powerful telescope towards— a section of the universe also long-assumed to be empty.