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“If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. But he knows the way I take….” (vv. 8-10)

You don’t have to be able to see something for it to be there. You may not fully understand what it is, for it to be fully what it is. And sometimes it’s a little child that leads you down a rabbit hole and onto a journey of discovery towards something you hadn’t imagined!

Like when, on January 7, 1610 Galileo turned his telescope towards Jupiter and became the first human to see the moons of Jupiter. It took him a few more days of observing that there were four “stars” that moved back and forth on a plane and never left the vicinity of the planet before realizing these were moons that orbited Jupiter like the planets, including Earth, orbit the sun.

Not that it was legal for him to say any of that, because it was the official position of both the church and state in Italy, and indeed, all of Europe, that everything revolved around the Earth, and it got him in not water with the Inquisition. But facts is facts. Planets revolve around the sun and moons revolve around the planets.

Ever since astronomers have been discovering more and more moons in our solar system. Earth has one. Mars two. Jupiter has 95 that we know of, Saturn at least 146. Uranus has 27, Neptune 14, and distant Pluto (which got demoted from planet status a few years ago) has five.

But one thing hasn’t changed. Venus doesn’t have a moon.

Or does it?

One night not so long-ago Latif Nasser, the host of the popular science podcast Radiolab, was putting his two-year-old son to bed when he happened to glance at the solar system poster on the wall. He’d seen it many times before, but something caught his eye. In addition to all the familiar planets, accompanied by some of their moons, was a moon orbiting Venus named Zoozve.

Zoozve?

Nasser has a History of Science Ph.D. from Harvard. Had he missed something? But he quickly discovered that when you googled Zoozve nothing came up. When does that ever happen?

He checked the NASA website. It said Venus doesn’t have a moon. He called his friend Liz Landau who worked at NASA. Same thing. Venus? No moon.

Well, who created the poster? An artist named Alex Foster. Nasser called Foster, but Foster just knew he’d found a list of moons from some source before he drew the artwork.

Meanwhile his friend Landau had an epiphany. Those weren’t “Zs” in the name. They had to be “2’s.” And in fact, in 2002, a strange object was discovered and given the name 2002VE. The first part of the name came from the year and the second part refers to Venus.

Back in 2002 Brian A. Skiff, who worked at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, was a part of a network of astronomers searching for asteroids that might one day strike Earth, after a series of movies like Armageddon impressed some in Congress that all life might be wiped out (as it had 68 million years with the dinosaurs). While searching the sky for “planet killers,” he spotted an object near Venus which was given that designation 2002VE.

Two years later four scientists from Finland and Canada discovered that 2002VE was not an ordinary asteroid. It was a quasi-satellite. That is, while it actually orbits the sun, it looks like it is orbiting Venus because it never leaves its vicinity. Quasi-satellites had been suggested as theoretically possible over a century ago, but this was the first one actually discovered.

They also figured out it had been captured by Venus from Earth 7,000 years ago and would likely wander off about 500 years from now. But if you lived on Venus, you’d see Zoozve, an oblong object around the size of a football field, circle your planet across the night sky. Assuming you could survive the 900 degree temperatures and the eternal cloud cover so you could actually see the sky.

Now the person that discovers an astronomical body has the right to suggest a name, which then has to be approved by an international body. That’s so people don’t name asteroids and other objects after their cat (which someone actually got away with once). The name has to be associated with a mythology of some sort. Nasser decided to ask Skiff if he’d suggest 2002VE be given the name Zoozve. Skiff said he didn’t remember discovering the object, but no. Then Nasser explained about his kid and the poster and NASA and the scientific studies written by Finns and Canadians. Skiff thought about it some more, and finally said yes.

And evidently even though there is no Zoozve in any known mythology, the scientists in charge decided to go with the name anyway, since Zoozve isn’t a planet, a moon, or an asteroid.

It’s something else instead.

Which brings us to our old friend Job. He was frustrated, even angry, as he debated with his three so-called friends who insisted that everything evil that had happened to him happened to him because he himself had done evil. Job insisted otherwise (and we know he was right!), increasingly agonizing because he cannot find summon God as a witness to testify on his behalf. God is unseen, unknowable, even unfindable -- “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. But he knows the way I take….” (vv. 8-10)

And ultimately God will peel back the blinders we all wear with regards to the wonders of the universe, show him the wonders of creation, and remind him – and us – that something magnificent is happening all around us even if we can’t see it. And when we do see it, it’s even more wonderful than we imagine.