WORLD - Space Isn’t Pitch Black
Look up at the night sky and, if you’re away from city lights, you’ll see stars. The space between those bright points of light is, of course, filled with inky blackness.
Some astronomers have wondered about that all that dark space—about how dark it really is.
“Is space truly black?” says Tod Lauer, an astronomer with the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) in Arizona.
It’s a tough question that astronomers have tried to answer for decades. Now, Lauer and other researchers with NASA’s New Horizons space mission say they’ve finally been able to do it, using a spacecraft that’s traveling far beyond the dwarf planet Pluto. The group has posted its work online, and it will soon appear in The Astrophysical Journal.
To try to detect the faint glow of the universe, researchers went through images taken by the spacecraft’s simple telescope and camera and looked for ones that were incredibly boring.
Then they processed these images to remove all known sources of visible light. Once they’d subtracted out the light from stars, plus scattered light from the Milky Way and any stray light that might be a result of camera quirks, they were left with light coming in from beyond our own galaxy.
In fact, the amount of light coming from mysterious sources was about equal to all the light coming in from the known galaxies, says Marc Postman, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. So maybe there are unrecognized galaxies out there, he says, “or some other source of light that we don’t yet know what it is.”
So where does the light come from? Perhaps, he says, there are far more small, faint dwarf galaxies and other faint regions on the outskirts of galaxies that instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope can’t detect and so scientists just aren’t aware of them. Or maybe there’s more dust out there interfering with the measurements than scientists expected.
-www.npr.org, 18 November 2020
Arno's Commentary
Scientists are supposed to present indisputable facts backed up by exhaustive research and cold, hard figures. Quite obviously, when it comes to space, these scientists in reality are only theoretical scientists. So, is there an answer to the darkness and the light?
Yes: here is what the first four verses of Genesis 1 document: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.” What we learn from the Bible is that, on the first day of Creation, God created light and divided it from the darkness. But this had no relationship to the light known to humanity since the beginning; namely, that originating from the sun. Only on the fourth day of Creation, we read in verse 16: “And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.”
Of course, scientists will continue to occupy themselves with the unknown mystery of space, but the end thereof will always be darkness.
How simple and yet immensely profound are the words of Jesus: “…I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12).
Arno Froese is the executive director of Midnight Call Ministries and editor-in-chief of the acclaimed prophetic magazines Midnight Call and News From Israel. He has authored a number of well-received books, and has sponsored many prophecy conferences in the U.S., Canada, and Israel. His extensive travels have contributed to his keen insight into Bible prophecy, as he sees it from an international perspective.
