The cosmos and God

The James Webb space telescope, launched two years ago, has been producing some dramatic images of the furthest reaches of the known universe, with amazing clarity. A whole new world of the cosmos has, all of a sudden, opened up.

The images, beautiful and often surreal, hint at the staggering scale of our universe. The average galaxy contains 100 billion stars. The Milky Way is estimated to contain 100 to 400 billion, and  Andromeda, our nearest neighbor galaxy, may have 1 trillion stars. Current estimates of the number of galaxies in the observable universe range between 200 billion and 2 trillion.  

The numbers are almost beyond our ability to fathom. There may be as many as 300 sextillion stars in the universe. That’s a 3 followed by 23 zeroes. That’s just a scientific guess — but whatever the number, the observable universe is probably the most dramatic representation of what infinity might be like. Endless.