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, at least out to 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 Lippershey, astronomers eventually noticed that the stars were much, much farther away than had been thought. Distances began to counted in light-years (the speed of light was first measured by Ole Romer in 1676), or how far light travels in one year, about 6 trillion miles, an unimaginably vast distance. Yet it was soon seen – 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. Yet 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 his the massive 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.

This opened a whole new world, and Hubble estimated there may be 2 billion such galaxies, although others now think that may be 2 trillion, all separated by billions of light years. And he also discovered that they are all moving away from each other, with greater velocity the farther they are from any given point (the so-called ‘Hubble’s Law’, which would lead a few years later to Le Maitre’s theory of the ‘Big Bang’, but more on that later). For all we know there is no end to the universe. (And we will leave aside the question of other life forms, whether or not sentient, possibly inhabiting these countless planets)

Why? Why did God make a universe so big, that we would only realize its size in the twentieth century?

As the Catechism says, God created the world to manifest His glory to mankind, even if that remained hidden for aeons, and what signify ‘God’  but an quasi-infinitely vast, measureless universe? Trillions upon trillions? This but echoes Scripture, the heavens are telling the glory of God. 

All for us, and our wonder.

If this is the glory of this heaven and earth, the form of which is already passing away, how can we imagine what the next will be? Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the things which God hath prepared for those that love Him. 

So fret not, dear reader. The Almighty has counted the hairs of your head, and the stars of heaven. You are worth more than many sparrows, and any number of galaxies.

 

 

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