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Scientists, Spiritual Leaders Find
Meaning in Webb Telescope Images
O SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
Image of the Carina Nebula from the James Webb Space Telescope
showing the “Cosmic Cliff s,” about seven light-years high
to the Webb Telescope images from Jewish
astrophysicists and rabbis suggest a har-
mony between religion and science.

“Th e two biggest sellers probably for
[the James Webb Space Telescope] are its
ability to study these extrasolar planets
systems, but also its ability to see galax-
ies and their very early youth by looking
very far away and very far into the past,”
said University of Pennsylvania Reese
W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and
Astrophysics Gary Bernstein, who was
The Jewish Federation’s
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Courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
n July 11, NASA released the
fi rst images taken from the
James Webb Space Telescope.

A “dawn of a new era in astronomy,”
according to the agency, the images
provide the most detailed and clearest
infrared images of space, including of
the most distant galaxies and oldest star
clusters detected, according to NASA’s
press release.

For scientists, the images from the
Webb Telescope are representative of
the new opportunities for seeing the
universe, as well as a refl ection of the
culminating eff orts to achieve scientifi c
advancement. For spiritual leaders, the
reaction is similar.

Th ough religion and science are some-
times pitted against each other and treated
as contradicting ideologies, the reactions
raised Jewish. “So we’re going to learn
an awful lot about how the Milky Way
and things like it came to be.”
Th ough in awe of the new fi ndings
about space, Bernstein doesn’t feel the
need to attribute the vastness of the
universe to a deity, though he says some
members of the scientifi c community do.

“For me, and maybe — probably — a
majority of the people working, we don’t
feel the need for an agent in nature,”
Bernstein said. “I can be awed by what I
see there because it’s just what the uni-
verse produces.”
“Even on a more basic level, it’s just
realizing that the human scale of things
is so limited,” he added. “Our expe-
riences are very limited compared to
what’s in the whole universe.”
Th ough Bernstein does not have a
strong belief in God, his overall sen-
timent about outer space aligns with