Astronomers and cosmologists aim to set our Earth and our Solar System in a broader context. Some success has been achieved in understanding how material created in an initial big bang could have evolved into the galaxies we see around us, and how the chemical elements of which we are made could have been synthesised via nuclear transmutations inside stars that exploded before the Solar System formed. This progress brings into sharper focus the profound interrelation between the cosmos, where gravitational forces dominate, and the microworld; it leads to speculation on why the laws of nature governing our Universe are as they are, and whether they could in principle have been different.
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