You are being pro­vid­ed with a book chap­ter by chap­ter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chap­ter. After read­ing the chap­ter, 1. short­en the chap­ter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any impor­tant nouns in the chap­ter. 3. Do not trans­late the orig­i­nal lan­guage. 4. Keep the same style as the orig­i­nal chap­ter, keep it con­sis­tent through­out the chap­ter. Your reply must com­ply with all four require­ments, or it’s invalid.
I will pro­vide the chap­ter now.

SPACE AND BEYOND
 
�            Earth is locat­ed with­in the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is
about 100,000 to 200,000 light-years in diam­e­ter, but it’s just one of
pos­si­bly bil­lions of galax­ies in the known uni­verse.
 
�            The star Alpha Scor­pii, or “Antares,” is more than 550 light-years
from our Sun but it’s the 15th bright­est star in the sky and has 15 times
the mass of the Sun.
 
�            Although Mer­cury is the clos­est plan­et to the Sun, Venus has the
hottest aver­age tem­per­a­tures at 867 °F.
 
�            Alpha Cen­tau­ri is the clos­est solar sys­tem to our own at only four
light-years away. It has two stars and a plan­et that could poten­tial­ly
sus­tain life.
 
�            Cap­tured Ger­man rock­et sci­en­tists helped the ear­ly Amer­i­can and
Sovi­et space pro­grams. The Sovi­ets, though, had devel­oped rock­et
tech­nol­o­gy ear­li­er, giv­ing them an ear­ly advan­tage in the Space Race.
 
�            NASA start­ed the Nation­al Aero-Space Plane (NASP) pro­gram in
1986 to build the world’s first pas­sen­ger, sub­or­bital space lin­er. It was
can­celled in 1993 before there were any flights.
 
�            Mer­cury and Sat­urn are both vis­i­ble to the naked eye. Their names
come from the Greeks and Romans, and when mod­ern astron­o­my was
born astronomers decid­ed to keep the tra­di­tion of giv­ing celes­tial
bod­ies Hel­lenic names.
 
�            An astro­nom­i­cal unit (AU) is the dis­tance of the Earth to the Sun.
One AU is about 93 mil­lion miles or eight light min­utes.
 
�            Priests dou­bled as sci­en­tists in ancient soci­eties. After 1,800 BCE,
Baby­lon­ian priests/astronomers were the first to doc­u­ment pat­terns in
the move­ments of celes­tial bod­ies by using math.
 
�            Ceres is the largest aster­oid in the solar sys­tem as well as a “dwarf
plan­et.” The planet/asteroid is also a hap­pen­ing place in the sci-fi TV
series, The Expanse.
 
�            The terms “astron­o­my” and “astro­physics” mean the same thing.
They both refer to the study of celes­tial objects and phe­nom­e­na that
take place beyond the Earth’s atmos­phere.
 
�            El Cara­col is a spi­ral stair­case struc­ture locat­ed in the Maya city of
Chichen Itza that was believed to have been built around CE 906. It’s
believed that the struc­ture served as an astro­nom­i­cal obser­va­to­ry.
 
�            The plan­ets Mer­cury and Venus have no moons due to the Sun’s
grav­i­ty. By com­par­i­son, the out­er plan­et Sat­urn has at least 83 moons.
 
�            Most sci-fi TV shows and films depict space bat­tles with rag­ing
explo­sions and fire every­where. Since there’s very lit­tle oxy­gen in
space, though, there’d also be very lit­tle fire.
 
�       Elon Musk’s Space X com­pa­ny was found­ed in 2002, two years after
Jeff Bezos found­ed Blue Ori­gin. Space X cur­rent­ly focus­es on
trans­port­ing peo­ple and mate­ri­als to the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion.
 
�       The Kuiper Belt is a ring of aster­oids, comets, and dwarf plan­ets just
beyond Nep­tune. It’s about 30 to 50 astro­nom­i­cal units from the Sun
and is about 20 times as wide and as much as 200 times more mas­sive
than the aster­oid belt.
 
�       Jupiter may be com­prised pri­mar­i­ly of gas, but it still has two and a
half times more mass than all the oth­er plan­ets in the solar sys­tem
com­bined.
 
�       Richard Bran­son found­ed Vir­gin Galac­tic in 2004 with the intent of it
being the world’s first pas­sen­ger, sub­or­bital space lin­er. In 2018, the