A cosmic perspective.
One hundred years ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble announced his discovery that the spiral nebula know as Andromeda was actually a galaxy of its own, completely updending our understanding of the scale of the universe. Before this revelation, we thought our galaxy was the only one. Now we know it is just a speck among hundreds of billions of others. Talk about a perspective shift. In this article we celebrate Hubble's discovery with at deep dive into the cosmos as we know it - and as we don't. Through nine questions, from the merely intriguing to the existential and the utterly bonkers, we are going to launch you headlong into an invigorating version of the Total Perspective Vortex imagined by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the end of the universe, a machine designed to force us to confront the staggering vastness of the cosmos and our place in it.