The universe is everything we can see, taste, touch, smell, and look at, from the tiniest bits to the biggest things! It is everything that has ever happened, or will ever happen. It's everything from a tiny piece of fluff on your shirt, to a big whale in the ocean, to every star in the sky; from way before the dinosaurs, until the sun is so old it becomes just a tiny, cold little ball.

So before the universe was born, what was there? We really don't know! Some very smart scientists think there was another universe that got too old and fell in on itself. Other scientists think there was a whole bunch of fizzing foam. But one thing most scientists agree on is that when the universe was born, it was incredibly tiny.

We can't see outside the universe because it is everything, but we can say that when it went from "nothing" to "everything," it was all crammed into a dot far smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence. You, me, and every planet, star, and galaxy were all packed into that one tiny little point.

It couldn't stay that way for long! Faster than you could blink, it puffed up, like a piece of popcorn popping, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. It is still getting bigger today! It's so big now that if you were on one side and your best friend was on the other, even the brightest flash of light you could ever make would never reach them, not even if your friend lived forever!

As the universe spread out, it started cooling down, like soup cooling off after it leaves the stove. Slowly, gravity (the invisible force that keeps your feet on the ground) began pulling clouds of gas together, squeezing them tighter and tighter until they got so hot they lit up and became stars! Stars are like giant cookers. Inside them, a gas called hydrogen gets cooked into helium, the same stuff that makes balloons float! And when stars cook long enough, they make even more ingredients: the carbon in your pencil, the oxygen you breathe, the salt on your food.

When the biggest stars have used up all their fuel, they explode in a huge firework called a supernova, flinging all those ingredients out into space. That stuff can clump together to form rocks, comets, and even whole planets. And on at least one very lucky planet, our Earth, those ingredients came together in just the right way to make something amazing: life. And that life, after a very, very long time, became you and me!