Absolutely nothing to do with the election!

Instead, something hopeful – the Golden Age of Telescopes has begun

To get our minds off the coming election, let’s take up a topic that – unlike politics – is hopeful and inspiring.

The modern refracting (lensed) telescope was invented in 1608 in Amsterdam. Astronomers, sea captains and generals immediately showed interest. Within a few years Galileo, and Simon Marius working independently, employed telescopes to discover the four moons of Jupiter.

Last week NASA used a SpaceX rocket to launch Europa Clipper, the largest planetary probe ever built, on a nearly six-year journey to Jupiter’s enigmatic moon Europa, which may have an ocean.

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Turns out there are not just four moons of Jupiter. There are at least 95, perhaps a much larger total. Every time telescopes improve, more is learned about the outer solar system. Which means humanity is about the learn a great deal – because the Golden Age of Telescopes is beginning.

In the 19th century, universities and the Catholic Church engaged in a competition to build observatories – for scientific research and, in the case of the Church, in hope of confirming the supernatural.

This year my annual Christmas-month A Cosmic Thought essay will argue the supernatural has in fact been confirmed – it’s just way different from what was expected.

Photo by Elisa Schmidt on Unsplash

Next came lab-run observatories like the Palomar, near San Diego, and Mount Wilson, outside Los Angeles, where Edwin Hubble made two of the leading discoveries of modernity – first that the Milky Way is not the only galaxy, second that the rest of the universe is accelerating away from us.

Then came space telescopes – the Hubble, launched by NASA in 1990, showed there are not thousands of galaxies, the assumption at the time, but at least 100 billion galaxies, perhaps an infinity of galaxies.