In 1995, scientists pointed the Hubble Telescope at an area of the sky near the Big Dipper. The location was apparently empty, and the whole endeavour was risky – what, if anything, was going to show up? But what came back was nothing short of spectacular: an image of over 1,500 galaxies glimmering in a tiny sliver of the universe. Alex Hofeldt (with animation by Bliink) helps us understand the scale of this image. Even after you have watched this extract from Hofeldt’s Ted-Ed lecture it is unlikely that your head will stop spinning with the enormity of the universe.
Between 1405 and 1433, during the Ming era, Chinese Admiral Zheng He, who was also the court eunuch, commanded seven expeditionary voyages as far away as East Africa and Middle East. These expeditions, known in Chinese history as the treasure voyages, consisted of hundreds of ships of enormous dimensions carrying a crew as large as 28,000 and great amounts of treasures. The purpose of the voyages were to project Chinese power and wealth to the outside world, as well as to establish imperial control over the maritime trade.
