In 1609, the optic lens had already been invented. People in Europe wore glasses, used binoculars, and even had telescopes. But astronomy really changed when an Italian instrument-maker named Galileo pointed his telescope toward the sky. The scope was a simple wooden tube. It had two lenses. What Galileo first saw might not sound impressive to us. (He glimpsed just a few craters on the moon and the Milky Way.) But for his time, the discovery was extraordinary!
Galileo’s telescope changed people’s minds about how the universe worked. For the first time, people began to see that the Earth revolved around the sun. It also changed the way people thought about science. Suddenly, people didn’t get to decide what the universe was like. They had to rely on facts. Thanks to the telescope, they could observe the facts for themselves.
As history marched on, telescopes grew stronger. They showed more precise images. In the 19th century, the spectroscope arrived on the scene. The spectroscope divides starlight into its different colors. The patterns the colors make shows a star’s elements. Suddenly, astronomers could find out more than a star’s location. They could also find out what it was made of.
In the coming years, scientists realized something else. They needed more than bigger telescopes. They need to look at space from space. When they observed from the ground, Earth’s atmosphere got in the way. Looking at the stars through the atmosphere is like looking at something through a glass of water. You can see this for yourself. Stars that appear to be twinkling in the sky are actually just getting “bent” by the atmosphere.
In the 1940s, an astronomer named Lyman Spitzer made a suggestion. Why not send a telescope to space? By 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope had launched into orbit. It still orbits 380 miles above Earth. Hubble sends us incredibly sharp images. It tells us when stars come to life or die. It tries to answer questions about the universe. How old is it? How big is it? Where did it come from?
We know that God made the universe just by speaking. Will the Hubble Space Telescope be able to tell us more details?
