BIG PLAYGROUND
Seeing the universe through a hole drilled into a grain of sand

If a grain of sand represented an entire galaxy, you would need six rooms full of sand to contain all the galaxies in the known universe. In this installation I have taken a single grain of sand, which represents our Milky Way galaxy, and had a tiny hole drilled into it. This hole represents where we live, but also where we have already found thousands of other planets around other stars within that tiny portion of our galaxy. The grain is seen under a magnifying glass.

People can play in an enormous amount of sand and imagine running their fingers through billions of galaxies. Each grain of sand, or galaxy, contains 100’s of billions of stars. To see the insignificant area we have looked for earth-like planets is powerful.

Click here to see how many exo-planets have been found so far.