Stars and Galaxies

God commanded Abraham to look up and, if he could, count the stars (Genesis 15:5). In reality, he was trying to tell Abraham that his offspring would outnumber him—just like the stars. We had no idea how many stars there were in the universe until 1995, when astronomers pointed a powerful telescope at a tiny place in the sky. The Hubble Deep Field is the name given to the image that was amplified by the telescope. They discovered that galaxies exist as far out as human vision and most likely much farther. With that instrument, one may see about 100 billion galaxies, each of which has an average of 100 billion stars!

Why are there so many stars?

According to the Bible, on the fourth day of Creation Week, God created the stars. Many people in antiquity believed that they were used for prophecy, however God explains in Genesis that He made them in order to aid in timekeeping and seasonal awareness (Genesis 1:14–18). In order to demonstrate His size and strength, He also created the stars, which, despite their abundance, He made without difficulty (Genesis 1:16). Although the Bible claims that God knows every star by name, we are unable to even count the stars (Psalm 147:4).

There are large and small stars:

Some stars are significantly larger than the sun, but most stars are far smaller.
Blue hypergiants, the heaviest, with masses more than 100 times that of the sun. R136a1, a blue hypergiant, is enormous. It has a diameter of roughly 43 times that of our sun, is 200 times more massive, and has a brightness of 5 million times that of our sun. 163,000 light years separate Earth and R136a1. It would seem as bright as the full moon if it were as near to us as Proxima Centauri is.

There are incredibly dense stars:

A teaspoon of a white dwarf star would weigh almost the same as an elephant since white dwarfs are extremely dense objects.

Even denser are neutron stars. Neutron star stuff in a teaspoon would weigh the same as nine hundred Great Pyramids! Pulsars are named from the energy pulses they release when they revolve extremely quickly.

Neutron stars are not nearly as dense as black holes. This implies that everything that approaches a black hole is drawn in by its intense gravity, including light! The objects that are drawn to black holes can be used to determine their locations.

Without God, stars could not have existed!

According to evolutionists, stars were created when dust and gas clouds collapsed. However, gas expands—this much is known. So, they say that the collapse was brought on by a star that burst. Then again, where might the first stars have come from, and where did that star originate? If God had not created stars, they could not have developed.

There exists a vast range of stars:

"Star differs from star in glory," the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:41. Stars vary greatly from one another.

Our sun, a yellow dwarf star, is the kind of star with which we are most familiar. (It appears yellow due to the atmosphere's dispersion of light; it is actually white.)

Red dwarfs are the smallest and lightest stars; they are invisible without a telescope and only have a tenth of the mass of the sun. Apart from the sun, Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to us, a red dwarf that is located 4.3 light years away. Red giants are stars that resemble the sun in size and brightness but are not as hot. The largest, known as red "hypergiants," have a width of around 2,600 times that of the sun; one example is VY Canis Majoris.