Thomas Wright, a clockmaker from Durham, in the north of England, publishes the book “An Original Theory of the Universe,” in which he hypothesizes that stars are uniformly distributed in a disk-shaped volume we call the Milky Way, and that there are an uncountable number of galaxies uniformly distributed throughout infinite space. Wright estimates that there are 3,888,000 stars in the Milky Way and 60 million planetary systems like our own.
