The universe isn’t just deep, it’s also wide—wider than anyone could possibly imagine. Take, for instance, this 9-gigapixel photo that captured 84 million Milky Way stars. The most amazing thing about it isn’t that it’s the largest digital photo ever taken or that it captured 10 times more stars than any previous study has. It’s mind-blowing because the image only captures about one percent of our entire sky.
While we still haven’t stepped foot (or space probe) outside of our Solar System, we’ve seen galaxies located as far as 13.2 billion light years away. Thanks to the Hubble telescope and some extreme photography from the last 10 years, we’ve been able to look deeper into our universe than ever before. If scientists are right about the universe being 13.7 billion years old, we could be just 500 million light years short of seeing the first stars created after the Big Bang.
