Posted on 09/01/2012 7:28:34 PM PDT by lasereye
Orion is one of the most well-known and easily recognized constellations of the winter sky. The three bright blue stars in Orion’s belt seem to draw our attention instantly.1 Such stars are a strong confirmation of the biblical timescale.
Most stars generate energy by the process of nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in the stellar core. This is a very efficient power source. Theoretically, a star like the sun has enough hydrogen in its core to keep it burning for ten billion years. But that’s not the case with blue stars.
Blue stars are always more massive than the sun. This means they have more hydrogen available as fuel. Yet, blue stars are much brighter than the sun; some are over 200,000 times brighter!2 They are “burning” their fuel much more quickly than the sun, and therefore cannot last billions of years. Based on their observed luminosity, the most massive blue stars cannot last even one million years before running out of fuel.
None of this is a problem for the biblical timescale of about 6,000 years for the age of the universe. But if the universe were 13.7 billion years old, as secularists allege, then it really shouldn’t have blue stars. Yet blue stars abound in every known spiral galaxy. It seems that these galaxies cannot be even one million years old.
Secular astronomers must assume that new blue stars have formed recently to replace all those that have burned out over deep time. They claim that some nebulae (clouds of hydrogen gas) eventually collapse under their own gravity to form a new star. Some astronomy textbooks even have pictures of nebulae labeled as “star-forming regions” or “stellar nurseries,” as if star formation were an observed fact. But it is not. Star formation has never been observed.
Star formation is problematic at best.3 Gas is very resistant to being compressed. On earth, gas always fills its container. In space, there is no container. So gas expands indefinitely. If the gas could be forced into a sphere that is very small (in comparison to a nebula) such as the sun, then the gas would be held together by its own gravity. However, in a typical nebula, the gas pressure far exceeds the miniscule force of gravity. Secular astronomers now believe that external forces, such as a shockwave from an exploding star, are necessary in most cases to trigger star formation.4 Observations confirm that gas clouds expand; they do not appear to collapse into stars.
Even if we could compress the nebula sufficiently to the point that the force of gravity was strong enough to prevent the gas from expanding, other effects would kick in, thereby preventing the formation of a star. Clouds of gas always have a weak magnetic field, which would be concentrated if the cloud were compressed. This dramatically increases the field strength. The magnetic pressure would halt a shrinking cloud and drive it to re-expand.5 It’s a bit like trying to push the like poles of two magnets together.
Also, gas clouds always have a small amount of angular momentum; they rotate, if ever so slowly. But much like a skater who pulls her arms and legs in as she spins, a collapsing gas cloud would spin-up dramatically. The “centrifugal force” generated would tend to prevent any further collapse. Gas pressure, magnetic field strength, and angular momentum all work to prevent star formation. From a scientific perspective, naturalistic star formation appears unlikely at best. The evidence seems far more consistent with the biblical account—it appears that stars were supernaturally created only thousands of years ago. With blue stars scattered across the cosmos, our universe certainly “looks” young.
References
1. Going from east to west, the stars are named Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka.
2. Alnilam—the center star in Orion’s belt—is a blue supergiant with a luminosity that is 275,000 times greater than the sun.
3. Wiebe, D. Z. et al. 2008. Problems of Star Formation Theory and Prospects of Submillimeter Observations. Cornell University Library. Posted on arxiv.org July 21, 2008, accessed July 13, 2012.
4. But, of course, this would require a previous star, and so it cannot be used to explain the formation of the first stars.
5. Hartmann, L. 2008. Accretion Processes in Star Formation, 2nd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 57-58.
* Dr. Lisle is Director of Research at the Institute for Creation Research and received his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado.
Speaking of outer space, if you live in Georgia, please look upwards at 266 degrees West and tell me what that pulsating red and green luminous object is with the flashing lights. It has been stationary for 40 minutes so far.
No I don’t. You should take a video if you can. It sounds interesting.
If they were created only thousands of years ago, the light going out in every direction would also have needed to have been created in place as well, as most of the observable universe, including parts of our own galaxy, are much farther away than 6000 light years away. Just like all the isotopic ratios here on Earth, of certain radioactive ores that sure make it look like they have been decaying for billions of years. Including the complete absence of the so-called “extinct nuclides” (such as I-129) with half-lives that are very long compared to 6000 y but very short compared to the alleged 4.5 billion year age of the Earth.
This article drops several contexts. Namely, that there are also lots of yellow stars and red stars in the universe, we can measure the distance to stars and we know the speed of light is a constant. We know there are stars that are more, much more, orders of magnitude more than 6,000 light years away. Therefore the universe is older than 6,000 years.
However you answer this, please don't tell me it's a mystery. A more plausible explanation is that your theology is simply wrong.
It looks like a flashing red/green/white light with the naked eye. With binoculars, it is so detailed. Wow. Just wow.
Dr. Russell Humphreys has proposed a possible solution to the distant starlight problem in his book Starlight and Time using the general theory of relativity.
Can general relativity also explain how stars that are supposed to last for millions or billions of years, have already gotten around to supernova-ing for us today? (Or, in fact, millions of years ago such that we are finally just seeing them today?)
Red and green just happen to be the two colors that determine right-of-way. For boats, at least. Please take a picture or a video.
What establishes with a high level of certainty that a star can’t supernova until it’s been around for millions of years?
Unless the speed of light was not always what it is now, in this brief moment of time we inhabit.
If you put a radar gun on a vehicle moving down the road for a hundred yards, and it maintained a constant speed of 50 miles per hour, would you assert that it has always moved at that speed?
I think there are still a couple Joshua pines older than 6,000 years...
Or bristlecone pines. Whichever one it is that lives almost forever!
It is patently clear that Evolution demands vast periods of time to "get everything done" - as if all that is needed is to tack on a few billion years here and there to account for this or that evolutionary process.
A common saying that describes a primary assumption of evolutionists is that if you put a bunch of monkeys in a room and set them in front of computer keyboards, eventually they will type out the Encyclopedia Britannica. This assumption is, I believe, wholly unsupportable.
In actuality, the monkeys will probably only be able to string a few words together, no matter how much time they are given. The vast, almost incomprehensible complexity that we see all around us cannot have come about "all by itself" - no matter how much time is allowed.
This is the central fallacy of Evolution. There is much we do not know about how the world came into being (I am always amused to see Evolutionists speak with confidence about precise sequences of events they imagine to have occurred billions of years ago). The simple, unanswerable truth, which any child instinctively (but not Bill Nye) knows, is that unfathomable complexity does not spontaneously arise.
If you come across some kind of unknown device lying on the path in the forest, do you pick it up and exclaim: "Amazing the confluence of just the right chemical elements and energy perhaps from a lightning strike at this very spot, along with enormous amounts of time for evolutionary development, which produced this interesting device!"
If you spouted such nonsense and truly believed it, you would be a candidate for the insane asylum. What you say is: "Wow, I wonder where this came from - who made this?" While I have more questions than answers, as a Christian I affirm with absolute confidence: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth..."
But if the universe were 13.7 billion years old, as secularists allege,
///
secularists?!?
...there are 10’s of MILLLIONS of devout CHRISTIANS,
who believe in a God who can create a Universe beyond what you seem to believe.
who believe that God talks in many parables in the Bible,
and there is no reason to take words as literal,
that result in the belief that God told us to examine all things, and keep that which is good and true...
yet deceives us, with ALL our studies, in many disciples, from geology to astronomy.
To put it delicately, this is just not so. It is only one of several possible interpretations of the Biblical account.
Another way to see Genesis 1:1 is to understand it as a gap in time from "In the beginning..." to "the Earth was (became)..." that can be filled by an undefined period of time.
****If the universe is 6000 years old, how can the light from a galaxy a million light-years away reach Earth?****
Those who believe the universe is “Billions of years old” have a similar problem.
If you’d like to know about it put “Horizon Problem” in your favorite search engine.
even more especially, a verse in the OLD testament.
(which btw, has the wife of Adam created twice,
and differently...)
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i wish the people in that institute, would make as much effort to help their Christian brethern being persecuted, raped, and killed, in Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, etc.,
as they do defending a small part of the OLD testament.
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i’m sure Jesus would approved of how they prioritize spending their time.
The same sorts of things that establish that blue stars don’t last billions of years. Either you accept what astronomers tell you about stars, or you don’t. Such as: smaller, cooler stars last far, far longer than big hot blue stars do. By reason that they emit less power, therefore, the fuel that they have lasts longer; if indeed blue stars are hundreds of thousands of times brighter than other stars, then, for the same mass they should last hundreds of thousands of times less, which places the lifespan of the smaller, less powerful stars into the billions of years. If stars lasted only 6000 years, they’d be going off like popcorn right now, don’t you think? Their numbers would all be coming up right about now. But they’re not, and we only see about one supernova per galaxy per year - out of the billions or trillions of stars that each galaxy has.
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