As a boy, I fell in love with the stars. My grandfather had given me a book about astronomy, and I had fun gazing up at the heavens trying to locate the different constellations depicted within its pages. But the more I looked upward, the more questions I had. Just how vast is the Milky Way? Is there life on other planets? And what would it be like to visit places like Jupiter or Saturn?

Obviously, I’m not the only one with these questions, or else astrophysicists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and academics like James Trefil would probably be out of a job. Fortunately for us, they have now joined forces to write Cosmic Queries: StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. In this fascinating volume from National Geographic, they address many of our burning questions about space and the universe around us.