The Universe is More Amazing Than We Could Ever Have Imagined

With the rise of scientific rationalism and enlightened thinking, and the subsequent decline in basing what we know purely on superstitious or purely faith-based belief systems, it might be easy to believe we've taken the mystery, majesty and awe out of our understanding of the universe around us.

In fact, the Universe turns out to be more mind-blowing than we ever could have imagined in our early belief systems. Not only is the Universe not confined to the seven moveable celestial bodies we've always been able to see with the human eye (Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn - after which the days are named) and a few thousand stars, it's actually unfathomably richer and more unbelievably vast than that.

If you pick a section of the sky in which there appears to be nothing and point a powerful telescope at it, it turns out there's gazillions of celestial objects in it:

It's so vast in fact that it's difficult to conceive of the relative sizes of these objects. Here's a comparison of the size of the earth to various planets and stars:

And that's just a comparison based on zooming out from the size of the Earth. What happens when we zoom in? Prepare to have your mind blown by this interactive zoomable model of the scale of the universe: http://htwins.net/scale2/