“He also made the stars.”
A couple of years ago when the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into deep space, there was much in the news about how, through this telescope, we would be able to look back in time, over 13 billion years. I called my friend Walter Green, who is much smarter about this stuff than me and said, “What on Earth does that mean? How can a telescope look back in time?” Walt patiently attempted to explain how we see light thousands of years after it has left its origin and the twinkling stars we see may have originated from what is now a dead star. However, because the Webb telescope can travel so far it will actually capture light before we see it on Earth, maybe even see the star’s birth.” Honestly, I still don’t understand.
I don’t have to understand to appreciate…
Meet Spiral Galaxy 628 in Constellation Pisces,
The Webb Telescope recently captured this image of a galaxy that is 32 million light years away. That is 188,116,011,941,875,447,387 miles away. (If you are wondering how to say that it is 188 sextillion, 116 quintillion and some change.)
Meet Spiral Galaxy NGC 1365 in Constellation Fornax
This galaxy is 56 million light years away. That’s 329,203,020,898,253,600,000 miles. 329 quintillion miles equates to 688,995,312,997,877 round trips to the moon. Get it? I can’t.
There are thousands of photos and explanations that my friend Walt understands at Webb Telescope.
It’s nearly impossible for me to wrap my head around what this all means. These distances are nearly incomprehensible. So are the number of stars in the Universe (some say approximately 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 200 billion trillion). No one on Earth really knows. I can’t help but wonder when the real estate is this immense, is it really all for us? Who else is out there?
I’m delighted that despite the mind-blowing, state-of-the art technology required to take these photos and beam them back to Earth, many of the star systems’ names hearken back to the Ancient Greeks who christened many of them after their gods. Like those Ancient Greeks, I can’t stare into the night sky or view these incredible photos without thinking about my God. It’s just a throw away line in Genesis, “He also made the stars.”