‘As far as we can see with our ever improving telescopes, there are at least a hundred billion galaxies arrayed throughout the universe. Each, like the Mliky Way, is an “island universe” containing billions of stars. Nearly all galaxies are members of groups or clusters, which are part of even larger structures called superclusters. All of these large concentrations are connected by filaments or sheets of galaxies, which enclose huge, bubble-like volumes of empty space, the cosmic voids.

The great unifier of the cosmos is gravity. It holds the stars of a galaxy, and the galaxies of a cluster, together. But clusters, groups, and isolated individual galaxies are all flying away from each other, a continuing aftermath of the big bang, an explosion of space itself that astronomers believe formed the universe 11 to 15 billion years ago.’