Our place in space
Less than 500 years ago, people thought that the Earth was the cenre of the Universe. It is only within the last few hundred years that we have learnt that the Earth is just one of nine planets revolving around the Sun.
What's more, our Sun is just one of more than 200 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way and the Milky Way is one of countless billions of unknown galaxies within the Universe.

Will the Universe ever come to an end?
At present, the Universe is still expanding as it has done ever since the Big Bang. Whether it will continue to do so is one of the big unanswered questions of astronomy, the science of the stars. There are two main theories about what will happen. The Big Chill idea suggest that the expansion will continue for ever with the galaxies, stars and planets growing ever farther apart, darker and colder, eventually even the stars will go out. Alternatively, some astronomers believe that the forced of gravity in the Universe is such that the galaxies will eventually begin to fall back on each other and that the Universe will collapse, in a superhot moment known as the Big Crunch.

Expanding space
The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it moves. This revelation led to the discovery that the Universe is expanding. It was made in 1929 by American Edwin Hubble. The Hubble Space Telescope is named after him.