When Jennifer Wiseman was studying astrophysics at Harvard, there were no known planets outside of our own solar system. Today, astronomers have identified thousands of planets surrounding distant stars. In fact just last week, the announcement of seven planets orbiting a dwarf star in the constellation Aquarius, stunned the astronomical world.
What Wiseman did do during her college years, as an undergraduate researcher at MIT, was discover a comet, the comet known as 114P/Wiseman-Skiff. She is now Senior Astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She is also the director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion and speaks often about science and religion, which she is doing in Madison this weekend.
“It’s a wonderful time to be alive, in terms of what we are discovering in the universe,” Wiseman told a lunch gathering at Upper House today. She described the different types of optical and radio telescopes that are capable of sweeping the skies with different wavelengths of light, and showed off some of the photos taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope that was launched in 1990.
The photos that Wiseman shared were stunning: galaxies, nebulas, planetary close-ups, planetary moons, etc. Some of the science behind the images was just as stunning.
For instance, as our telescopes continue to improve and allow us to see further into space, we are essentially traveling back in time, since distances are measured in light years and it is taking longer and longer for that distant light to reach our telescopes. Scientists have calculated that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. Wiseman says astronomers are now looking back as far as the first billion years, and a new telescope launching into space next year will see even further back.
These most distant galaxies were discovered by pointing the Hubble telescope at what was thought to be an empty patch of sky. Each galaxy has billions of stars and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe.
Wiseman observed that as the universe continues to expand, galaxies continue to move further and further apart, except for those which are close enough to merge. She noted that our Milky Way Galaxy, for instance, will eventually be merging with our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. “The night sky will look diferent in 3-4 billion years,” she said.
Although astronomers are making exciting discoveries on a regular basis, there are still some larger questions which continue to confound them: trying to understand dark matter and dark energy, which are detectable but not observable (so far); and trying to discover whether there are other planets like earth and whether there is life beyond earth.
Wiseman did not talk about her Christian faith at this event, beyond saying that Psalm 19 inspires her. The Psalm begins: “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.” But Wiseman has discussed her faith in interviews and articles, such as with InterVarsity’s Emerging Scholars Blog and with the Christian Women in Science of the American Scientific Affiliation. She is also speaking at the Science and Faith event, Saturday, March 4th, at Blackhawk Church in Madison.
Faith and Astronomy explored in this article: Are We Alone? by Emily McFarlan Miller
