This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, shows a spiral galaxy named NGC 278. This cosmic beauty lies some 38 million light-years away in the northern constellation of Cassiopeia (The Seated Queen).
Yesterday NASA announced they’d been wrong for decades.
There aren’t 200 billion galaxies in the universe.
There are more like 2 trillion.
In the mid-1990s, astronomers arrived at the 200 billion figure with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Recently, however, a University of Nottingham team led by Christopher Conselice took another look.
They concluded that more than 90 percent of the galaxies can’t be seen by even our most powerful telescopes because they are too faint or too far away. The good news for you space fans? The even mightier James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to be ready by the end of the year.
So what does this mean for us “puny humans” as the Hulk calls us, floating along on Planet Earth, on one of these 200 trillion galaxies?
As far as how much God loves us, adores us, died for us, not a single thing.
Every verse in Scripture is still as true as it was when it was written.
He took infinite care when He created each one of us, made each of us in His image, to be exactly as He wanted us to be.
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. ~ Psalm 139:13
He cares for our every need. He cares more about us than about any galaxy, whether it extend for millions of miles or fit on the head of a pin.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendorwas dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’…” ~Matthew 6:25-28
A poem hung on the wall of my mother’s bedroom when I was a child, and I have a framed copy on my desk now. It is one of my all-time favorites. I think it says it all.
