A new space telescope launched yesterday that should soon deluge us with information and incredible pictures of the heavens.

We’re already in a golden age of astronomy. Major telescopes have come online in recent years, including:

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• James Webb Space Telescope (jwst), which can see further and zoom in deeper than any telescope ever built.
• Vera Rubin Observatory, which fills the opposite niche. With its extremely wide coverage, it will monitor the southern sky in real time, allowing us to spot millions of one-off events that would otherwise be missed.
• Euclid Space Telescope, like Vera Rubin, has a wide field of view for mapping and photographing billions of galaxies.

Yesterday NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after nasa’s first chief astronomer and so-called mother of the Hubble Space Telescope.

• Roman fills a gap between jwst and the two more wide-angle telescopes. Unlike jwst, it cannot see further and detect fainter light than Hubble can, but it can take Hubble-quality photos much, much faster.

It has the same size mirror as Hubble, but each observation will look at an area of the sky 100 times greater than Hubble. You’ll get the same amount of detail as Hubble, but each photo will be 100 times bigger.

• Hubble has photographed 0.8 percent of the sky during its 36-year lifetime. Roman will cover 12 percent of the sky in 17 months. It would have taken Hubble 1,700 years to achieve the same coverage.
• Roman’s largest survey would require 500,000 4K tvs to display in full quality. That’s 45 city blocks covered in tvs.

jwst can zoom in a long way to photograph distant galaxies. Roman will be much better at watching for distant events. Its wider field of view makes it better at repeatedly surveying the same area of sky, looking for change, like Vera Rubin. But its greater magnification means that, unlike Rubin, it can survey galaxies billions of light-years away.

Roman should also excel at photographing exoplanets—planets outside the solar system.

• Its field of view will enable it to survey the Milky Way looking for the “Xallarap effect,” where a huge planet causes a star to wobble.
• It will be the first telescope able to photograph a planet using the reflected starlight of that planet. All previous direct photos of planets have used the infrared glow of a relatively hot planet. But Roman carries a coronagraph, which blocks out the star’s light.

The telescope cost $4 billion and was finished nine months ahead of schedule. It launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket yesterday. It’s now traveling to a gravitationally stable point about a million miles away from Earth, in the same area as jwst, where it will arrive in about 100 days.

• Once there, it will go through a three-month testing and calibration period before sending back its first images early next year.

“Roman will usher us into a new era of discovery and make the invisible visible,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at nasa headquarters in Washington.

• That statement recalls what the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (New International Version).

It doesn’t take a space telescope to see evidence of God’s power: That is all around us. But each telescope increases our appreciation of how vast and stupendous the creation is and, therefore, how great is its Creator.

Sadly, Fox is yet to acknowledge such evidence. He’s looking to Roman for help in “answering humanity’s most profound questions about our cosmic history” and “setting the foundation for humanity’s search for life beyond our solar system.”

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in 1996, “Evolution is a satanic lie that prevents man from seeing his mind-dazzling potential behind Mars and the whole universe!” He wrote that “the big problem with man is that he doesn’t believe God. That means God cannot reveal His truth to sinful man.”

• These space telescopes show how creation reveals God in great detail. But as long as men look to these telescopes to answer questions like Why man? and Where does he come from?, they won’t see any of it.

These spectacular images of the universe don’t just point us back to our Creator but also point us forward to why He created mankind and where He wants to take us.

“What nasa and other space projects are doing is exciting,” wrote Mr. Flurry in our May-June issue. “They lift our eyes upward and stir our hearts. But God wants us to have an even more inspiring vision: His space program!”

Combine these new images with an understanding of this program, and you will be filled with inspiration. Read Mr. Flurry’s article “God’s Space Program” for more.

Iran War Update

• The United States hit Iranian rocket launchers stationed at the Strait of Hormuz yesterday, the first U.S. strikes against Iran since July. Iran retaliated today by striking American military assets in Jordan.
• U.S. President Donald Trump posted a fictional portrayal of a missile attack on island oil infrastructure, captioning it, “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!” The post appears to be merely another threat from the president, but it has Internet users asking about a current or imminent attack on the key Iranian facility.

Trump’s ‘Biggest Oil Deal in World History’

On Friday, President Donald Trump announced that the United States had made a major oil deal with Venezuela that will more than double U.S. oil reserves.

• In a Truth Social post, he said U.S. officials and private companies had gained majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven Venezuelan oil reserves across 17 oil fields.
• The deal does not give the U.S. title to the oil itself but rather a joint venture that gives the U.S. a majority share of future output from those 17 fields.

Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s acting president, confirmed what she called a historic deal, saying the plan should raise production, create jobs, and rebuild the oil industry.

• The announcement follows the U.S. military’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Trump has since sought closer ties with Venezuela’s interim government and has used U.S. leverage over Venezuelan oil to pressure Communist-run Cuba. He has cut oil shipments to Cuba to force the Communist government there to “make a deal.”

In America Under Attack, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry reveals that President Trump is an end-time type of the ancient Israelite King Jeroboam ii, who presided over a national resurgence. In the eighth century b.c. Jeroboam conquered Damascus and Hamath, weakening Israel’s Syrian neighbors.

• Yet in doing so, he inadvertently removed a key regional power that was preventing the Assyrian Empire’s rise to dominance.

This history may be repeating itself with President Trump. His moves against Cuba and Venezuela are empowering America by weakening the grip of China and Russia in the Caribbean. Yet the downfall of Maduro has also strengthened Roman Catholic influence in both Cuba and Venezuela.

In Revelation 17 and 18, God labels the German-led, Vatican-influenced empire currently emerging in Europe as “Babylon the great.”

• In corresponding Old Testament prophecies of Isaiah 23 and Ezekiel 27, this empire appears under the name of Tyre, the most powerful trading center of the ancient Mediterranean. This powerful trade bloc is prophesied to besiege and conquer the U.S.
• This makes President Trump’s moves in Latin America ironic.

The Trump administration is pushing one U.S. enemy out of Venezuela, but it is blind to the rise of another enemy that God will allow to punish the U.S. if its people do not repent of their many sins.

Pope Courts Lutherans

On Wednesday, Pope Leo xiv met Lutheran bishops from Norway during a pilgrimage to Rome. He urged them to seek communion and to work with Catholics for peace and justice. He invited them to visit sites of the early Christian martyrs and said Catholics and Lutherans share baptism and a mission in the world.

The pope is trying to close a historic rift: In January 1521, Pope Leo x excommunicated Martin Luther.

• In January 2021, Cardinal Kurt Koch said the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation were studying the historical, theological and canonical questions around Luther’s excommunication. They plan a joint statement for the Augsburg Confession’s 500th anniversary in 2030.

Catholics and Lutherans signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999. Major differences remain over the papacy, the sacraments and ordained ministry. If these gaps close, the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran churches could move toward fuller communion soon.

Isaiah 47 describes a church it calls “the lady of kingdoms.” This church exerts power over many nations yet has protesting daughter churches. She vows to bring her daughters back into the fold, saying, “I shall not sit as a widow, neither shall I know the loss of children” (verse 8).

Herbert W. Armstrong, who founded the Plain Truth magazine (predecessor to the Trumpet), taught from the early 1930s that scriptures such as Isaiah 47 describe a coming union between Catholics and Protestants. For example, the October 1961 Plain Truth says:

The pope will step in as the supreme unifying authority—the only one that can finally unite the differing nations of Europe. The iron jurisdiction over both schools and religion will be turned over to the Roman Catholic Church. Europe will go Roman Catholic! Protestantism will be absorbed into the “mother” church—and totally abolished.

To build and influence this church-state superpower, the Catholic Church will make strategic compromises—standing firm in one area, yielding in another. Isaiah 47 and Revelation 17 reveal that the old Holy Roman Empire, influenced by the Vatican, will be resurrected one last time.

To understand what the Bible says about the religious system that will dominate the Western world in the last days of man’s rule, read Mr. Armstrong’s Who or What Is the Prophetic Beast?

IN OTHER NEWS

Nepal-Tibet official flood death toll passes 900: Flash floods that tore through the Nepal-Tibet border region last week have killed at least 919 people, with more than 4,700 still missing, according to updated figures from officials in Nepal and China. Of the missing, more than 590 are foreigners, including 85 Americans, and authorities expect the death toll to keep rising. For the Bible’s answers about why a loving God allows such tragedies to occur, read Why ‘Natural’ Disasters?

Global wheat prices hit a three-year high on Thursday, with Chicago Board of Trade wheat futures contracts reaching $7.60 for ¾ of a bushel due to renewed conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the Black Sea, disrupting the global wheat trade. Before 2022, both countries were among the world’s biggest wheat exporters.