Matt Kilty

An astonishing, unfathomable number.

900,000 light years away is that star from us, which is way outside of our Milky Way galaxy.

And this is an important footnote.

Hubble actually totally botched it.

He's not even close.

That star is not 900,000 light years away from us.

It is, in fact, 2.5 million light years away.

And just to put this into perspective, if you think about it like this, so think of Earth as us here in New York City.

The edge of the Milky Way galaxy, what we thought was our universe, is probably like out around Moscow.

What Hubble was observing, what he was measuring, would be like from us here in New York to the moon.

And in astronomy circles, this was huge news.

Because what it told us for the first time is that that cluster of stars isn't just a cluster of stars in our own galaxy.

It is, in fact, a galaxy in and of itself.

And so Hubble keeps at it, and he keeps pointing this telescope, and he finds another cluster of stars that is 2.73 million light-years away.

He finds another that's nearly 10 million light-years away.

another that's 15 million light years away, another that's 23 million light years away.

And as he's measuring these galaxies, he realizes that they're all moving out away from each other.

Out into what?

Nobody knows.

It is just trillions of galaxies expanding out into the infinite.