The Psalmist spoke of stars. But the writers of Scripture lived before Galileo, before Herschel, before Hubble. They did not know what we know now — that each of those stars is part of a galaxy, that the Milky Way is one of two trillion such island universes, that every star they could see was a neighbor compared to what we have since found.
If God knows the stars by name, then he knows the galaxies that contain them. He knows the spirals with their elegant arms. He knows the ancient ellipticals that stopped forming stars a billion years ago and have been watching ever since. He knows the distant quasars — blazing cores of galaxies so far away that their light has been traveling since before our Sun existed.
Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name.
Isaiah 40:26
Consider what God does not say in Job 38:31. He doesn't say "Can you bind the gravitational structure of Messier 45?" He says the Pleiades. He says Orion's belt. Human names. He didn't correct them — rather, He used them as His own vehicle for communication, knowing that He has other names for those stars. God condescended to speak our language back to us. Our names don't overwrite His. But He has shown that the human act of naming the sky is not vanity, but rather a way for us to participate in His glorious universe.
Two trillion. The human mind cannot hold that number as a number. It can only hold it as a shape — a shape so vast it makes the galaxy we live in feel like a single neighborhood in a city that has no edge. And yet the Scriptures say each piece of that city is known. Named. Held in mind.
We did not build CORE because we think we are improving on God's naming. We built it because we believe that the act of naming is a form of love, and love should be practiced, not hoarded. When you name something, you stop treating it as scenery. You start treating it as a participant.
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.
Psalm 19:1-2
There is a galaxy 2.5 million light-years from here that you can see with your naked eye on a clear night from the Northern Hemisphere. Most people who have ever lived did not know it was a galaxy — they thought it was a smudge, a cloud, a defect in the dark. Andromeda. A trillion stars. Named.
But what about SDSS J1030+0524, a quasar whose light has traveled 12.9 billion years to reach us? Its host galaxy existed when the universe was less than a billion years old. It watched the universe develop around it. It is older than everything you have ever loved by a margin too wide to imagine — and it has only ever had a catalog number.
It has one now. A name shaped by what it is. A reason that honors the journey its light has made. CORE gives it that — not because we have the authority, but because the act of naming is itself a kind of reverence.