The DAY the UNIVERSE Changed Forever."Sign of the Times" magazine 2013.

  In 1609, a man named Galileo Galiliei was living in Italy in a university town called Padua, when news came that inventors in the Netherlands had created a device that object appear closer than they were. Galileo skeptical that such a thing was possible, but he soon learned how the device worked, and made a better one himself. Galileo's spy glass made things seem nine times closer and could be used for military and commercial purposes. He continued tinkering with this invention, and before long , he has a twenty-power telescope.
      When Galileo pointed his new invention at the moon, he was surprised to discover that the sky around the moon was filled with stars-- stars no one has ever seen before. The "Milky
Way," was well known, bit it was thought to be a cloud of gas or dust particles. Of course, the Milky Way is really a large number of stars that are too faint and close together for the eye to see clearly. For the first time, Galileo. could see that there were far more than just the 1,200 stars the ancient Greek had counted.
    Ge was surprised, again, a few weeks latter. While looking at the planet Jupiter through his telescope, he discovered small "stars" that seemed to stay close to Jupiter. Surprisingly, these "stars" first appeared on one side of Jupiter, then disappeared, and then reappeared on the other side, of Jupiter. Later, they disappeared again and reappeared on the other side. Galileo realized that they were orbiting Jupiter like our moon orbits the earth. Galileo saws three of them at first, then a fourth. today we know there are sixty-seven moons circling Jupiter.

     This discovery that moons circled something else besides earth supported an idea that astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, had suggested: The earth is not the center of the universe.  [ note J.B. Galileo also supported this and nearly caused his death, at the hands of the kings of the church]  A scientific revolution was underway, a revolution that still affects us today!

             SO MANY GALAXIES! SO MANY STARS!    

       SO what have we learned?

  We have learned that the universe is much larger and more complex than we could ever imagine.! Let's see if we can wrap our minds around some of the numbers, shall we?

   Have you ever looked up to see the constellation Orion the Hunter {in the western sky] in late fall and winter? Betelgeuse, on Orion's top=left shoulder, is so big that if that star was in our Solar system instead of the Sun, it wouldn't fit into the big orbit the earth makes when it circles the sun from ninety- three million miles away. It wouldn't even fit inside the orbit of Jupiter and that's 484 million miles from the sun!

    Peering even deeper into space, astronomers focused the Hubble space Telescope on a seemingly empty patch of the night sky. Empty no visible stars, galaxies, or anything. They focused on a spot for eleven days, then examined carefully the photographs. In this spot, a little spot about 3 % of the size of a full moon, they found more than 10,000 galaxies, not just stars, but entire galaxies each with billions of stars.

     Think about this in this way, the next time you are on a beach, put up a hand full of sand. If estimates are right, there are more stars in the Cosmos than there are grains of sand on all of earth's beaches. What we see now are only just one hand-full!

      The wonders of the universe are beyond human imagination. We haven't even mentioned nebulae, quasars, black holes, or any of the many other fascinating objects, in our universe. Can it really all have come into existence accidentally?

A UNIVERSE OF ENERGY.

      Before we address that question, it's important to  understand that the universe contains an unimaginable amount of matter and energy, We think of the universe as being made of stars, but it also contains many things we cannot see. As we learned earlier, we do not know exactly how many stars there are in the universe. But if the 200 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy are about the average, and there are at least 175 Billion galaxies, then there must be at least 350 billion-trillion stars. 

      And the visible stars may form only about one-tenth of the mass of the universe. The rest is in  the form of "Dark Matter", which includes objects too small or too faint for us to detect. It also includes the black holes, which are so massive that even light cannot escape their gravitational field. All this matter contains an enormous amount of energy.

      The  energy of the universe is also beyond our ability to comprehend. Each star shines brightly because it produces so much heat from the friction of atoms rubbing together that it glows. Our own Star, -  the Sun-- has a temperature of more than fifteen million degrees Kelvin. This huge amount of energy is enough to provide heat to warm our planet and light, which  allows plants  to grow and produce our food. Remember our sun is not a large nor hot star compared to most others. The total amount of energy in the universe is far beyond our ability to measure or even imagine.

    The size of the universe and the vast energy is contains, naturally lead us to one question: "Where did it all come from"?

A BEGINNING FOR THE UNIVERSE.

     IMAGINE  you holding a balloon in your hands. now take a pen and mark spots one inch apart on this balloon. When you hold the balloon to your lips and fill it with air, what happens to the distance between the spots? As the material of the balloon between the spots expands, all the spots move father apart from each other, right?

     Scientists have discovered that something similar is happening to the stars. They are all moving apart from one another. Apparently, the universe is expanding, like a balloon expands with air.

NOTE: (J.B.) There were those, who during the 1950--60's held the view, that central gravity will pull every particle back to it self, and then when the pressure gets too great, another "Big Bang" like a YO-YO universe, and every thing will some-how begin all over again, and again!

      If the universe is expanding, it must have been smaller in the past. The further we look into the past the smaller the universe would be. If we could look back far enough, the universe would have shrunken down too small to see, then to an invisible point. This would be the beginning of the universe. From that invisible point, the entire universe has grown to its present size. Based on this reasoning, scientists began to believe that universe had a beginning.

      Modern scientists were divided at first on this idea. One astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, was so apposed to this idea that he mockingly referred to it as the "big Bang." The name caught on, and  we still refer to the theory as the big bang theory. Further studies and discoveries seemed to support the big band theory, and most scientists now accept it.

      HOWEVER, the big bang theory raises some very big questions. What would cause the universe to appear from a tiny point, or from. . .well. . nothing? Could this happen accidentally? Or is there something or someone behind the creation of our universe?

Please answer, the last three of these questions, to YOUR satisfaction, OK?

Thanking Y O U for your time...Questions?  Comments?  John at www.servant@frontier.com

Need to learn more? Visit your Seventh day Adventist Church, any Saturday/Sabbath @ 9:15 AM..Heaven will give you the peace of mind we all need.

Next:  A DESIGNED UNIVERSE  TRUTH MATTERS-- SIGNS of the TIMES ; Pacific Press.

Other site: www.blbn.org  wwwamazingfacts.org. www.adventistbookcenter.com.   www.3abn.org