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God, the Universe, and Hubble

On September 23rd, 1924, the universe got a little bigger – at least from our perspective. The ancients – Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy – thought the cosmos more or less the size of our Solar System, stretching as far as Saturn, with a sphere of fixed stars rotating just beyond that. When modern telescopes were invented, first by Galileo in 1609 (based on a toy version by the Dutchman Hans Lippershey) astronomers eventually noticed that the stars were much, much farther away than had been thought. Distances began to be counted in light-years (the speed of light was first measured by Ole Romer in 1676) – how far light travels in one year, about 6 trillion miles, an unimaginably vast distance. Not only that: it was soon surmised – by Galileo, Kant and Herschel – that our own star, the Sun, is one of billions of stars in a galaxy we call the Milky Way, about 100,000 light years across.

So far, so vast. But on this day, nearly a century ago, the astronomer Edwin Hubble, a dashing, pipe-smoking all-American, who had been a star athlete – ha, ha – in college, playing football, baseball, basketball and running track – noticed as he peered through the 100-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson observatory in California, that one of the bright objects in the sky was not a star, but a whole new galaxy, the Andromeda Nebula, itself 2.5 million light years away.

Hubble eventually estimated there may be 2 billion such galaxies, although others now think perhaps 2 trillion, each one with billions of stars and separated by billions of light years. Hubble also discovered that these galaxies are moving away from each other at fantastic speeds, with greater velocity the farther they are from any given point (the so-called ‘Hubble’s Law’, which would provide evidence a few years later for Le Maitre’s theory of the ‘Big Bang’, but more on that later). For all we know there is no end to the universe, as space expands. (We will leave aside for now the question of other life forms, whether or not sentient, possibly inhabiting these countless planets)

Praise the Lord

Read the Whole Article at https://catholicinsight.com/