At the turn of the 20th century, astronomy got a serious glow-up. An influx of money and scientific advancements led to building bigger, better telescopes at newly-founded observatories across the country. Astronomers could see farther than ever before, and this led to a debate about exactly what they were seeing. Were these nebulous, fuzzy-looking discs in the sky part of the Milky Way? How big is our universe? On today’s episode, we’re telling the story of how the work of many astronomers contributed to a complete redesign of how big we know our universe to be and what we think it looks like.

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