Heads regularly bend heavenward at the nighttime sky. Our author, an astronomer, leads us on a short cosmic tour, in awe of both creation and the Creator.

From the time I was an infant, my mother knew I’d someday become an astronomer, or so she used to tell me. It seems that I’d never sleep in my carriage during our walks, but my eyes would stray toward the heavens — at least, inasmuch as one could view the heavens from New York City’s Central Park!

As a child, the Apollo program, visits to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, and science fiction, particularly Star Trek, nurtured my interest in space. For my sixteenth birthday I was given the choice of a party or a telescope. I opted for the telescope, and I’ve “wandered among the stars” ever since. From graduate school days — often nights — spent at Kitt Peak Observatory (near the University of Arizona), to treks up Mauna Kea in Hawaii, to remote observing from my present home in Naperville, Illinois, to the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, I have been living my dream of exploring the immense cosmos beyond our Earth.

Star Formation
My specialty has been investigating how stars and planetary systems — perhaps similar to our own solar system — form. Most of what we have learned in this field we’ve learned only in the past few decades, as advances in technology have made it possible to study the cosmos with increasingly better resolution across the entire spectrum.

The birthplaces of new stars are enshrouded in cold, dusty clouds, which are revealed by telescopes that can detect and image radio waves and infrared light. These regions appear as dark clouds or filaments against bright nebulae, as in these images of the Trifid Nebula that compare views of a massive star-forming region in visible and infrared light (view image).

Such star-forming regions are distributed throughout our galaxy, which has the shape of a disk with spiral arms. Our solar system inhabits the galactic “suburbs,” about two-thirds of the way out from the center, a distance of roughly 156 quadrillion miles, or 26,000 light-years (because light travels at a speed of about 6 trillion miles per year).

From a dark sky location, you can view the plane of our galaxy as the Milky Way, a band of light that stretches across the sky in a great circle, containing hundreds of billions of stars, most of them invisible to the unaided eye. Even with large optical telescopes, our view toward the center of our galaxy is obscured by dust, but it appears brilliant and star-packed in this infrared image taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope (view image).

Both the Trifid Nebula and the Galactic Center lie in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, which can be viewed looking south during summer evenings. Even binoculars will reveal many star clusters and nebulae to the casual observer.

Like all of my generation, I grew up learning that there were nine planets. Regardless of whether or not you consider Pluto a planet, we now know that the number of planets in the universe may be as uncountable as the number of stars. During the past dozen years, more than 250 planets have been detected orbiting “nearby” stars that are “merely” a few dozen light-years from Earth. Whether any of these planets harbor life is a question that is currently being explored and will be a major focus of the new science of astrobiology in the twenty-first century.

A Call to Awe
New views of the cosmos have raised a fear in many that often is expressed by the question, How can any conceivable God-of-the-cosmos possibly care about humanity?

The operative word here is “conceivable.” If science tells us anything about God, it is that God cannot be confined by the limits of the human imagination. In anthropocentric terms, our values focus on power and status, but in the Lutheran tradition, we profess to be a Christ-centered community.

In closing, I offer a call to awe, not fear, expressed beautifully in the motto of my friends and colleagues at the Vatican Observatory, which is inscribed on a telescope dome located at the Pope’s summer home in Castel Gandolfo: Deum Creatorum, Venite Adoremus — “Come, let us adore God the Creator!”

Dr. Grace Wolf-Chase is research astronomer, Adler Planetarium, and Astronomy Museum Senior Research Associate, University of Chicago.