Lasers, rockets, accelerators, fantastic photographic capabilities combined with space telescopes have tremendously expanded our vision of what surrounds us.
Physicists can detect gravity waves by an amount of a million trillion smaller than an electron.
That s smaller than anything on the atomic scales. Scientists are now looking at bigger, smaller, older, farther, and faster orders of magnitudes than have ever been known before in the natural world. By contrast astronomers tell us the universe is some 10,000,000,000 years old by using astrometry to mathematically measure stars and masses in space. For scientists, the frontiers of space hold the key to scientific questions about the existence of life on other planets, the real size of the universe, and Earth s role in it. The sheer scale of explorable nature has burst beyond our wildest assumptions with incredible proportions.