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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Maggie Aderin-Pocock

There’s a new space race – will the billionaires win?

Illustration of an astronaut with a picket fence
Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian

If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception.

The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, each star a sun like ours, many with planets orbiting them. In 1995, the Hubble space telescope captured its first deep-field image: this showed us that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our known universe, huge wheeling collections of stars dispersed through space.

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