A human lifetime is more than a hundred million times shorter than the current age of the Universe. Whether you are a professional astronomer or a casual backyard stargazer, you have only a few decades to drink it all in—to wonder how it works and how you got here.

The cosmos is full of strange happenings that we sometimes are lucky enough to witness because we happened to be paying attention to the stories the Universe is telling us. These tales are carried on bursts of light, showers of subatomic particles, and the faint whisperings of gravity, and every day that passes, we’re getting better at deciphering them.

In our lifetimes, we will only ever have a glimpse of the cosmos. But that glimpse is enough to transform our perceptions in dramatic ways and to answer the oldest questions we have about what the Universe is doing all around us.