Posted on 08/07/2007 3:54:06 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Four Evidences of Cosmic Youth 08/04/2007
Astronomers and planetary scientists routinely talk in millions and billions of years. Three recent science news reports raise questions about how to fit apparently young objects into a vast timeline.
1) Lunar burps: The moon is passing gas, reported Science News). This explains the long history of observations of lunar transients, or bright flashes observed from Earth on certain parts of the moon. Arlin Crotts (Columbia U) believes the flashes come from the decay of uranium that escapes through cracks, but mentions the possibility that volcanism is still active.
2) Flinging rings: Saturn’s G-ring has been explained in an announcement from Jet Propulsion Lab (see also) Science Daily). A persistent ring arc in the outer bright rings, confined by the moon Mimas, gets swept by the magnetic field, flinging particles into the tenuous G-ring. (The G-ring lies between the thin F-ring and the broad E-ring fed by the Enceladus geysers; see 07/11/2006). The original paper in Science1 says, “The dust-sized particles that dominate this ring’s optical properties should erode quickly in Saturn’s magnetosphere, yet there was no direct evidence for larger source bodies that could replenish the dust and no clear explanation for the concentration of such bodies in this one region.” The article and original paper do not mention how long this has been going on, but presumably the material would have long been depleted well before millions of years, because collisions in the arc are steadily being ground to dust by collisions.
3) Bursting moons: Speaking of Enceladus, a recent paper in Icarus2 said that tidal flexing cannot explain the heat coming out of this small moon, either now or in the past:
"The heating in Enceladus in an equilibrium resonant configuration with other saturnian satellites can be estimated independently of the physical properties of Enceladus. We find that equilibrium tidal heating cannot account for the heat that is observed to be coming from Enceladus. Equilibrium heating in possible past resonances likewise cannot explain prior resurfacing events."
Meyer and Wisdom said that the neighboring moon Mimas, about the same size but closer to Saturn, experiences 11 times as much tidal heating but shows no sign of activity. In their conclusion, they wondered that both Io (at Jupiter) and Enceladus (at Saturn) are both so active:
"But it is curious that one has to appeal to nonequilibrium tidal oscillations or episodic activity to heat both Io and Enceladus (Ojakangas and Stevenson, 1986). If the fraction of time spent in an active state is, say, of order 20%, for each satellite, then the probability that both are found in an active state today is only 4%."
Cassini will fly by Enceladus at very close range on March 10 and even sample particles in the plume; see announcement in Space.com.
4) Veil unveilings: Portions of the wispy Veil Nebula in Cygnus have been photographed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope. This highly-distended nebula is the remnant of a supernova explosion long thought to be tens of thousands of years old (see 02/16/2001). Now, a press release posted by Science Daily claims the explosion “could have been witnessed and recorded by ancient civilizations” as recently as 5,000 years ago.
Every once in awhile, it bears repeating: it is more empirically justifiable to infer young ages than old ages, because the observation-to-assumption ratio is much higher. You can take an observed phenomenon and extrapolate it backward from the present a bit – that is reasonable. But to start with an assumption of billions of years and then try to fit a short-lived phenomenon into it lowers the observation-to-assumption ratio by many orders of magnitude. Would it be reasonable to observe a sparkler for 5 seconds, and then claim it has been burning for 100 years? We think science should tether itself to the observations rather than run amok like a stray dog.
1 Matthew M. Hedman, Joseph A. Burns, Matthew S. Tiscareno, Carolyn C. Porco, Geraint H. Jones, Elias Roussos, Norbert Krupp, Chris Paranicas, and Sascha Kempf, “The Source of Saturn’s G Ring,” Science, 3 August 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5838, pp. 653-656, DOI: 10.1126/science.1143964.
2 Jennifer Meyer and Jack Wisdom, “Tidal Heating in Enceladus,” Icarus, Volume 188, Issue 2, June 2007, Pages 535-539.
What about rings around Uranus?..................
for perusal later...
ping
==What about rings around Uranus?......
What about them?
This article is one big non sequiter.
Any close ups?.......
==Any close ups?.......
I’m sure you can find close ups of the rings around Uranus all by your lonesome.
My oldest daughter is a Cosmic Youth. She has blue hair.
And one of my sons if definitely an alien.
It does.
“What about rings around Uranus?..................”
Send a probe.
==It does.
Not when the Church of Darwin gets involved.
Cute, but feeble analogy.
==Send a probe.
Don’t get him excited...the proposed journey might get him in trouble with his wife.
==Cute, but feeble analogy.
Cult of Darwin?
Buy gold! Use it to armor the compound.
That's nice, but what does the bizarre cosmological argument presented in this argument have to do with evolution??
Perhaps young earth creationists should stick to religion and leave science to the scientists?
Now our observations about the universe have to be attacked, I see. I had no idea Darwin was an astronomer.
So now any theoiry that postulates the universe as older than 6,000 years in age is “Darwinism”, right? How long before geocentriam is “real science”, and anything else is “Darwinism”?
Hell, let’s just save a bunch of grief and go back to a flat earth.
(Let’s try again with the typos cleaned up.)
Now our observations about the universe have to be attacked, I see. I had no idea Darwin was an astronomer.
So now any theory that postulates the universe as older than 6,000 years in age is “Darwinism”, right? How long before geocentrism is “real science”, and anything else is “Darwinism”?
Hell, let’s just save a bunch of grief and go back to a flat earth.
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