Since the dawn of humankind, we've looked up to the sky and pondered the awe-inspiring mysteries of the universe.

At first, we explained our rudimentary observations of the heavens with myth and superstition. Then, as we became a society driven by science, we learned that the cosmos couldn't be explained by stories; observation and theory brought the realization that we occupy a planet, orbiting some star — of countless billions others — in a spiral galaxy in a not-so-special region of a vast expanse we now know as a 14 billion-year-old universe.