The Love that Names the Stars
He determines the number of the stars;
he gives to all of them their
names.—Psalm 147:4
There are about 400
billion stars in our galaxy—what we call the Milky Way. (If you started
counting stars in our galaxy this moment and counted 24/7 without eating or
sleeping, it would take you 400 years to count to 400 billion.)
Several years ago
two astronomers in Baltimore, Md. bought time on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope
and conducted what they called the Hubble Deep Field Study: They took a 6100-hour
exposure of a small patch of sky near the Big Dipper that appeared to be devoid
of stars and discovered over 3000 galaxies (not stars). Based on that
discovery, astronomers now estimate that there are more than a trillion galaxies
in the cosmos, each containing billions of stars. The number of stars is beyond
computation, a number so vast astronomers no longer name newly discovered
stars; they give them numbers (PSR B1257+12).
God, on the other
hand, gives each star a name.
If God knows and
names the stars in the universe will He ever forget your name?
David Roper
