WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Visible Things: James Webb Space Telescope

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

The James Webb Space Telescope has caused some of the biggest revolutions in astronomy in the past four years, but how can Christians make sense of its findings? Join Eleanor as she ponders galaxies, telescopes, and age of the universe controversies.

Hi and welcome to Visible Things, the science news show that investigates the biggest mysteries in our visible world while honoring our invisible creator. I'm your host, Eleanor Whitaker, and today we're going to explore how the James Webb Space Telescope, Space Telescope launched in 2021, is radically changing our understanding of how the universe developed over time. Just over the past two years, this little telescope has made some of the biggest advances in science. and as a result has revealed so much more of the majesty of our wonderful creator. Well, I'm so excited to get started with you guys on this first episode of Visible Things. As a college student right now who is studying science, I'm passionate not only about learning about how the world works, but also about how that world points to what I believe is the central purpose of our existence,

our God, who sent his son, Jesus Christ, to die for us and rose again from the dead and has offered the promise of salvation to all, who believe. He also created the world and has chosen to reveal himself in the creation around us. Romans 120 says, for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. Guys, studying science is studying our creator and studying how he has revealed himself to us in general revelation. As someone who is interested in science news, and reads the media, I was shocked by how much materialistic bias is in the science media and how

no one acknowledges the reality of a creator. I've also been disappointed with how Christians have dealt with modern science issues and instead turned to maybe denying scientific methods or denying logical processes or being afraid to admit that some results might be true because they think that what if it contradicts their faith? And so Christians have not stepped up into the world of science and been able to point at things and say that result that that secular scientist got, that points to a creator. And that is what I am excited to do in this podcast. I believe that studying science has two main purposes. The first one is worship. Through science, we learn more about our wondrous God. And then we learn more. We can say that back to him and praise him. We can say things to

him like, Lord, you design motions so that we can understand it through Newton's second law and send rockets into space. The second purpose of science is to grow us in humility. When Job approached God in the book of Job, he said, I think I know everything about you. And God was like, did you put the stars in the place? Do you make snowfall from the sky? Do you provide food for the animals? And all Job can answer is no. And God's like, well, obviously, then you can't know how I work. Job tells us that the very process of science, which begins with a question that we can't answer, should increase our humility for such an amazing God who created a world that we can't always understand. God will reveal himself to us through science, but there are some questions that we may never answer.

But those unanswered questions should only increase our admiration for our creator. So this show, Visible Things, which gets its name from the verse Romans 120, is going to explore how the visible world that we see reflects the reality of an invisible creator. We're going to go through some recent science news topics from the past week or two, And then we're going to deep dive into a big topic that is really big in the science community probably and that Christians might, at least I haven't seen been super outspoken about like why we should own these results or maybe why there are reasons to say that we should be careful or cautious about some of the things that scientists are finding or that science news media out there is going through.

It is my prayer for this podcast that knowledge of science will not. only lead you closer to the Creator, but also to his son, Jesus Christ, and what he has done for us. If you are a believer, I pray that this would draw you closer in your relationship with the Lord. And if you're not, I pray that this will show you evidence of an intelligent design everywhere and then ultimately lead you to follow Jesus Christ. So with that being said, intro being on, let's get into our top news stories for the week. In 2007, scientists discovered an anomalous burst of radio waves that seemed to come from out of nowhere. Since then, they've detected hundreds of these random bursts that scientist called fast radio burst.

Earlier in January, some scientists theorized that the fast radio burst could be coming from this spinning, dense star called a magnetar. And their findings were optimistic. People were like, oh, yeah, that could be true. Well, then on January 21st, in a paper published in astrophysical journal letters, scientists said, oh, actually the magnetar idea might not work out. They found a galaxy that is supposedly thought to be too young to have magnetars. So either fast radio bursts don't come from magnetars, and the mystery of where they come from still remains unsolved, or maybe we need to rethink how we portray galaxies, and maybe galaxies much earlier than we thought had much larger and older stars or stars that appear to be older than previously theorized. On February 6, a paper published in science found that whale song shows similar language patterns

to human language. Human language has a scale of most used words that follows kind of an exponential distribution. The is the most common word in English, which is twice as common as the second most common word of, which is three times as common as the third most common word and so on. humpback whales also have this word frequency distribution. They have sounds that they use way more, and then they have occasional sounds that they use every once in a while. Like, as we might not use the word magnanimous very often,

but we're going to use words like bad or good or high way more often. A paper released on February 12th in the Psychonomic Bulletin Review found that adults can actually learn perfect pitch, or at least grow in their ability to learn perfect pitch. They put adult participants through a eight-week trial program that trained musicians with some previous experience to identify notes without any absolute references. They'd be able to hear a note and say, oh, that's an A or that's a B. It's most commonly thought that you're only born with perfect patronaut, and that's very hard to develop this. But this new study is showing that you can actually improve in it.

their participants were able to identify an average of seven different pitches with an accuracy of over 90%. All right, it's time to start our deep dive for this episode. Today we're talking about the James Webb Space Telescope, the telescope that's changing astronomy as we know. And bringing up some really interesting questions about the age of the earth and how Christians to deal with findings when NASA says, oh wow, this galaxy was 325 million years old. How should Christians do with that? So today I'm going to talk about my thoughts on how we should think about that while also talking about some of the crazy things that this amazing tool is showing us about God. All right. So come back with me to 1990 when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched.

It was an innovative telescope that intended to take pictures of the universe and the stars. You've probably seen these pictures before. Classic pictures of nebula, planets, galaxies, the Earths, the stars. If you Google like star pictures and the actual pictures of stars, not just artists, you'll come across Hubble's pictures. And the Hubble Space Telescope, when it was released in 1990, was innovative. It proved that the universe was expanding because it was able to see galaxies that were far, far away, and its light red shifting and showing that the galaxies were moving farther away. I'll talk a little bit more about what red shifting is later in the episode.

In 1990, right after and honestly right before Hubble was released, NASA was already planning its successor because Hubble Telescope has some flaws. Hubble Telescope is optimized to take pictures of stars in the ultraviolet light and the visible light spectrum range. For a quick physics review, light has comes in different frequencies ranging from X-Rexamines, ranging from x-rays, which is what helps take your x-rays when you go to the doctors, to long wavelengths, such as microwaves or radio waves, which can travel very far distances, but tend to have very long wavelengths.

And the visible light spectrum of light that we can see is right in the middle. Hubble is optimized to take pictures of stars because through the visible light spectrum, because stars release a lot of visible light. It's one reason why we can see them in the universe. However, the Hubble is not very good at seeing these long. longer wavelengths of light. And we want to see these longer wavelengths because the longer wavelengths of light, the farther back and farther away in the universe you can see. Here's why. Galaxies that are farther away from us, the light that moves from that galaxy to reach us gets this redshifted over

time. The wavelengths gets extended due to like hitting dust, losing energy. Higher frequencies mean higher energy. So as the light loses energy through space, it tends to redshift. And the wavelengths get longer and longer. So the farthest galaxies away from us have the longest redshift. Hubble is not able to see that far back. It can see, it was able to see very far, but NASA realized they wanted a telescope that could go beyond Hubble and see even further. And then the idea for the James Webb Space Telescope was born. Since 1990, NASA was working on this project. It launched in 2021. Its design is very cool. James Webb needed an even bigger mirror than Hubble and needs to get even farther out. How are you going to get a gigantic mirror on a rocket? You fold the mirror.

So the engineers literally use origami techniques that you use with a piece of paper to fold this mirror up into a rocket. And then once the rocket place the James Webb Telescope, where it's supposed to be the rocket, just kind of unfolded the telescope, which is just awesome. Go make an origami model of the James Webb Space Telescope someday. That would be pretty cool. Oh, James Webb Space Telescope is positioned past the moon. It's actually orbiting the sun. It's not orbiting the Earth, but it's in line with the Earth. So it's orbiting the sun with us, but we'll stay on track with us. But this telescope was designed to see these infrared wavelengths, which are like the longer red shifted wavelengths. And so it has been able to see farther back in the universe than any other telescope. That has really changed how we've seen this galaxies that are farther away from us. When the telescope burst started taking pictures, its pictures were stunning. If you haven't seen a picture that the James Webb Space Telescope is taken, stop right now and go look at it. A very famous one is a picture of the Carina Nebula, which looks like these, maybe like hills from Arizona.

It looks like a CGI artist was like, I'm going to make a starry scenery and paint it. Turns out what did. God made this beautiful scenery. We're able to see it through the lens of technology, yes, but it's the closest that humans are ever going to be able to see all these stars. but it's a stunning image. So many of the pictures are bright, beautiful, extremely complex. It makes you realize how many stars there are out there in the galaxy. And I do believe that as Christians, we should look at the pictures that James Webb Telescope is creating and say,

wow, our God is amazing and beautiful. Hubble was awesome. But James Webb Space Telescope pictures, like Hubble Pictures times maybe like a factor of 100. go compare them and you'll see that James Webb Space Telescope pictures take your breath away. It's amazing. So James Web to Space Telescope is really cool in that way. Now, in addition to taking awesome photos, James Web to Space Telescope, since it has been put in a spot in 2021, has fallen through on its promise of seeing some of the early galaxies. The earliest galaxy is taking a picture of.

The James Webb Telescope has both a camera, which can take in light and then a spectrometer, which can see all the different spectrums. but a certain frequency. And so from using these instruments, it has found that I believe at the moment it's the earliest could change any day. I'm sure it could find one that's even older. The galaxy is called the Jades Gs Z-Z-13-0 galaxy, and it's about age to be like 325 million years after the Big Bang, which is really early according to the Big Bang model. But this one galaxy has been really weird and really changing people's perspectives on what the early galaxies were like. They found that this galaxy and other galaxies in the similar type and similar age were way brighter than people thought. And this is particularly weird because brightness is related to mass.

So a star that is brighter is typically thought to be more massive and larger. When they saw these really bright stars and these really early galaxies, they were surprised because they didn't think that these stars could be that big. They thought the stars would be smaller because it takes longer for the stars to form. And so they expected very, very dim stars. But then along came jades and this had very bright stars in it. There's currently no consensus on why exactly this is. Could be due to multiple different reasons.

Hugh Ross, a Christian astrophysicist, who does a great job of explaining some of these findings. Ported in a blog post on John 1, that's probably due to like even four different things. There either was a higher star formation at that time, so the theories of star formation need to be changed, or there was a higher percentage of very massive stars at that time. Or there could be less dust than theorist thought, because so there's actually a lot of dust in the interstellar medium space and astronomers have to take into account this dust when they're doing calculations. So maybe there was either like less dust than thought. And then so if there was less dust, then these stars would appear to be brighter than actually thought. Or maybe we need to adjust our understanding of dark matter. There could also be different classifications of things or I mean the big one that is pretty sensational. It would be like just throwing out all theories of Big Bang and the current models, which be really cool, but not entirely necessary at this time. But this is an example of a huge unknown that James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered and that will be really interesting to follow

to see how scientists come to different understandings of what these early universes look like. So let's also talk about the question that maybe you've all been thinking about. Like, how should we as Christians deal with this age of the universe questions? Like this 325 million, million-year-old galaxy? Like, is it actually 325 million years? Should we say, no, that's not true. Like, James Webb Telescope, it's all wrong, and that's not agree with the Bible. Well, there are many different ways that Christians across time have answered this question, and I encourage everyone to go do their own research. But there are a few things that I think we should take into mind when thinking about some of these findings that James Webb Space Telescope

come out with. One, I agree with John Piper, a theologian. And when he wrote about this He said that we have to stick with some of the things that we do know. And we do know that the Bible is absolutely inerrant and true. And there are some things that the Bible is very clear on and we cannot compromise on. Three of those things in relation to creation is God created the universe. He was the first creator. He said let there be light. It did not just rain limb coppin in existence.

God created the universe. Second, God made Adam to be the first man. He created him out of the dust and breathed in him life. there cannot be any other humans before Adam because if that were true, then there'd be even more perfect humans before Adam and Adam wouldn't have been the first human to sin. There are several theological issues with that. So we have to say that Adam was the first man and was created by God through this miraculous means. And third, God created the universe to be good.

And that means he created it without sin. Some of these theories about how to make the Bible compatible with creation allow for death before the fall and animal death. And you have to be very careful about that because it is possible that animal death could allow sin to exist before the universe. So if we stay within those three things, there is some freedom with some other views of how the universe was formed. We have to assert that God could have decided to create the universe in this order that he presents in Genesis 1, 1 through 2. and he could have created it in 24 hours if he had wished through miraculous means, just like he uses miraculous means in many other parts of the Bible. And it is entirely possible the universe could be

6,000 years old and all of our theories could be incorrect. And if that's true, I'd encourage scientists to be very honest about what their research is. But it is also possible that God could have created the universe within 24 hours, 24 hour day periods, but created it to look old so that when we do science and we look back in time, we see that these things were millions of years ago. Maybe God created them to look that way, but they were actually created 6,000 years ago, but through miraculous means that we can't really detect this miraculous means through science. Other theories include like at the very beginning when God said let there be light, that there are millions of years and that, but then you use 24-hour days to create the rest of the universe. If we can say, honestly,

that if we step out in faith and say that everything in science is compatible with the Bible, and we don't try to make science fit one box or another, we will come to know God and better understanding that way. It is absolutely true that our Lord could have created this universe to look very old. But ultimately, we do know what he says in the Bible is what he wants to know about us, and he wants to know that he created the universe. So everything that we see, even if we find that the galaxies truly are millions of years old, If that is a true thing that is found truthfully through science, we should be able to say, wow, that displays the glory of God and the glory of our creator.

Our stars required incredibly complex processes to grow and develop, and they continue to develop. And by looking at older galaxies, we can see how they have developed and understand that the Lord created this world to be perfect for us. And we are in a unique position to create it above all other creative beings to see and experience the world outside of this earth that we live in, and that should cause us to glorify God. As Psalm 19 says, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the work of his hands. So, when Christians hear about what James Webb's Space Telescope is finding, we should use all of those complex things that it is found to point us closer to God. If the telescope seems to say that

the universe is millions of years old, that is compatible with the Bible. If we find that our current theories are completely wrong, and the universe is much younger than things, thought, that is also compatible with the Bible. The Bible requires us to say that he created the universe, but outside of that, we have a lot of different freedom. There are people who are going to look at the results of the James Webb Space Telescope and say, this is evidence for why the universe came on its own and developed. We don't need a God. As Christians, we should say, go, look at those pictures again. Do you see how complex they are? Do you see how amazing it is, how the galaxies he's formed this way and under these particular circumstances.

And we will say how the very evidence that they used to disprove God actually points to the fact that there was a creator. The universe is too complex to have just come out of nowhere. There had to be a beginning. God designed it all to glorify him. I think it's really funny how a lot of modern Christians see the Big Bang as contrary to a creationist worldview. When the idea of the Big Bang originally came out,

it was actually shown as huge evidence for a creator. The atheists were mad that the Big Bang existed. Why don't we take a hold of those type of ideas again and take something that secular scientists are using and say, ha, you accidentally proved that there is a creator in this world. I'm your host, Eleanor Whitaker. You've been listening to Visible Things on Radio Free Hillsdale at 101.7 FM.