...is utterly breath taking.

Gravity is an amazing thing. It's the glue that holds everything in the universe together. No one was quite sure how astroids and planets were made until an astronaut perform a simple experiment with a plastic bag, some sugar, in the zero gravity environment of space.

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/40910-how-the-universe-works-the-power-of-dust-video.htm

At a certain size, the gravity becomes strong enough, so that an astroid collapses into a spherical shape. When an object gets large enough, the gravity becomes strong enough to compact the center of the object, creating heat via friction. This heat can build up so much that it can break down the bonds that holds hydrogen atoms apart, and they are fused into helium. This is the birth of nuclear fusion, and it is how a star is born.

Star sizes vary greatly. Our sun is puny compared to others.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKiT06urRpk

Stars fuse hydrogen into helium, and the energy that's released gives us sunlight and starlight. When the hydrogen runs out, after millions or billions or perhaps trillions of years, depending on the star size, the star transforms, and begins fusing helium into higher elements. At this point, the star is dying. Once it produces iron the star explodes. And in that explosion, more elements are fused, creating rare elements like gold.

It is amazing to realize that every atom of gold you have seen or touched was created in seconds in the explosion of a dying star billions of years before our solar system came into existence. Every atom in your own body was created by a star somewhere in the distant past.

Just as planets revolve around our sun, when a large star explodes and goes supernova, what is left over is a super dense white dwarf star. A white dwarf may be no bigger than a small astroid, but it has enough gravity that if it was close to a planet the size of Jupiter, it would wipe out our biggest gas planet.

This is what gives birth to black holes. A body with so much gravity, that not even light can escape it. Black holes have so much gravity, that, just as planets revolve around our sun, entire solar systems revolve around black holes, creating a galaxy.

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is quite small, compared to others out there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HVb4YRsDIg

We have now found so many galaxies, that can create a 3-D map of their location. And wouldn't ya know it, but galaxies themselves seem to cluster together.

When we see how they're clustered together, they seem to create a universe wide type of web, called filiments.

What would the universe look like from your perspective if whole galaxies were the size of a grain of sand?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJpC_oQQxPI

And the amazing thing is that in all this structure, whole galaxy clusters, the filiments of the universe, all seem to move together precisely the same way that sugar crystals move around in a plastic bag in zero gravity.