Europe's Planck satellite is gathering cosmic data that will revolutionise our understanding of the universe
Possibly the most daring piece of modern science is the attempt to predict the patterns that galaxies make in the sky. The bold starting point is a statement on what the universe was like at a time when the entire visible universe was compressed into something like the size of a beach ball. That idea takes some getting used to. For starters, the notion that the entire visible universe could even fit into something so small as a beach ball is little short of mind-blowing: there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the visible universe, our Milky Way being just one of them, and each galaxy typically contains several hundred billion stars. Squeezing all that into a beach ball is testament to the fact that the substantial matter of our everyday experience is, in fact, largely empty space.
Jeff Forshaw
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