ARE WE STILL AWED BY THE HEAVENS?

IS SPACE MORE awesome than ever, now that we've walked on the moon and beheld the stunning photos transmitted by the James Webb telescope? Or is the night sky, thanks to modernity, more meh? In particular, do kids find the universe more meh than the metaverse?

- LENORE SKENAZY

Once nudged to consider the cosmos, even jaded kids can be gobsmacked. The things my students are most interested in are things that make them feel small,” says Abby Morton, a high school astronomy teacher in a working-class Boston suburb. They love anything that gives them context.”

During class, Morton hands out palmsized diagrams of the solar system. If the solar system were that big, she asks her students, how big would the Milky Way be?

“Bigger than the football field!” they venture, or even, Bigger than Massachusetts!” In fact, she tells them, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States. That mic-drop sense of grandeur continues to inspire even Gen Z.

“No matter where you come from or who your ancestors were, they were looking at the stars,” Penn State astronomer Michael Siegel tells his students at the start of the semester. Siegel studies supernovae—“the biggest explosions in the universe.” While stars are exploding daily, they do that close enough to be seen by the naked eye only once every 200 years.