The world is full of unsolved mysteries. In every community in every. Files are kept of cases the police have never been able to close, many dating from events that occurred long ago. Most of us like to think that with the right clues, we'd find the solution everyone else has missed. Do you know what the greatest unsolved mystery of all is? It's the mystery of how our universe was made. None of us was there at that time. So how do we find out what happened? Fortunately, in this case, the evidence is all around us. We just need to know where and how to look. We have come a lend way in tracking down this mystery. But the cosmic detectives are still far from closing the case with a verdict that is beyond reasonable doubt. Are you bold enough to try your luck?Once upon a time I was your age, and like you, I was curious. You may live in the city, or the suburbs, or perhaps in a small rural hamlet. In was born in a tiny, primitive village far from the lights of any city. There was no electricity, and when night fell. Only kerosene and oil lamps gave light. When those lamps went out, the darkness swallowed everything, and I spent night after night wishing to escape the poverty and hopelessness that hid within it. Yet, a different part of me-a bolder part- was thrilled when darkness fell over the village and the world fell silent. Let me tell you why.I imagined there was a story spelled across the night skies with stars, a fairy tale more wondrous than any I had heard from my grandmother. It was the story of how even a poor boy like me could one day slay the dragons and enter the glittering palaces that hung like diamonds from the roof of heaven. If you have never seen the velvety darkness of a night sky, it may be hard for you to picture how spectacular the stars can be, or how mysterious it is that they seem close enough to touch and yet more distant that anything we can imagine.Almost every night I lost myself in this mystery, and the further out into the stars my thoughts look me, the more mysterious they became. While I was still quite young. I decided that if ever I were to devote my life fully to a single goal, it would be to unravel the mystery of the starry sky. And it wouldn't be only to conquer dragons or capture castles. I believed the stars offer something else, something even more magical: the answer to where we come from and what we are made of. At that time few great scientists were studying these things with much seriousness. The science of cosmology-the study of our universe and how it came into being-was still in its infancy. You, the yond explorers of today, are the lucky ones. The study of the cosmos and its vast, uncharted regions is now going on at full speed throughout the world. And we are discovering things that are stranger than our wildest dreams.As a boy, I used to wonder how many stars were there. I even tried to count them, and ran out of numbers. Where had they come from, these uncountable, brilliant stars that appeared each night against the black canvas of the sky? How far away were they? Where there other worlds like ours out there, with other boys and girls like me asking the same questions? Did the universe have a birthday, and if so, who helped it to celebrate? Did we have to go to the stars for the answers, or were there people who knew? What I didn't realize, as a lonely boy in a remote village, was that I was asking the same questions that people-old and young. Rich and poor, wise and simple-had been asking for thousands of years. And like my most distant ancestors, I believed that the stars I could see on the clearest nights were all the stars that existed I couldn't have known then that the stars were all around me, like a field of fireflies on a summer night, and that I was part of this field. I couldn't have known that I was indeed made of stardust! The world is full of unsolved mysteries. In every community in every. Files are kept of cases the police have never been able to close, many da