Some Difficulties for Astronomical Ages
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Some Difficulties for Astronomical Ages

Philip Stott

The vast ages commonly assigned to most astronomical bodies are stated with great confidence. It is easy to overlook the fact that they have been deduced using untested hypotheses and unverifiable assumptions. It will always remain true that the just shall live by faith - and accepting the Biblical time-scale is simply one aspect of accepting God’s word on faith. What should not be overlooked is that at least as much faith is needed to accept the secular humanist astronomer’s time scale. As John Eddy admitted, there is a notable lack of observational evidence to conflict with Bishop Ussher’s estimate of the age of the universe (about 6000 years).

But there certainly is observational evidence which throws doubt on the immense time span of popular astronomy.

Supernovas are thought to be stars which give off vast amounts of energy as they collapse in on themselves and explode. Several have been observed in historical times and it is possible to observe their remains as they spread out and dissipate into space. Supernova explosions have been mathematically modeled and one can work out how many remnants of various stages should be visible when the cosmos is assumed to be any particular age. The observations fit well with predictions for a total age of the universe of just a few thousand years. They are in spectacular disagreement with thousands of millions of years.

Comets are small bodies which appear to be made of several kinds of ice and dust. "Dirty Snowballs" as Fred Whipple called them. Comets are usually put into two classes, Short Period and Long Period comets. There are marked differences in their orbits. Short period comets orbit the sun with a period of less than 200 years. Comets are of the order 10km in diameter. When they approach the sun some of their frozen gasses melt and evaporate, or sublime, and the pressure of the sun’s radiation pushes the released gas and dust into space. A typical comet, when close to the sun, is surrounded by a sphere of gas and dust (called a coma) hundreds of thousands of kilometres in diameter. From the coma a tail of debris millions of kilometres long may be seen - being blown away by the solar wind. Comets like Halley or Kahoutek lose about ten tons of material every second when visible. Obviously they cannot loose so much material for very long before they become completely exhausted. It has been calculated that the maximum age for a short period comet is of the order of ten thousand years. Even long period comets have a calculated life-span of only a few million years. This of course presents no difficulty for Bishop Ussher’s timescale. But the popular secular theories of today have the comets being formed at the same time as the rest of the solar system, thousands of millions of years ago. And that raises the problem of explaining the existence of comets today.

There is no evidence that new comets come from outside the solar system and commetary orbits make such a possibility seem very unlikely. So astronomers have had to look for a source of supply which could provide those we actually see. A Dutch astronomer, Jan Oort, examined observed orbits and developed a hypothesis which could hopefully explain the mystery. He hypothesized an enormous cloud of comets around the outer fringes of the solar system. Unfortunately they cannot be seen or detected in any way. It was proposed that a passing star (or possibly an as yet undiscovered binary companion to the sun) occasionally disturbs the cloud, so that some of the comets are diverted from their orbits towards the sun. Unfortunately no binary companion has been discovered (though it has been given the name "Nemesis" in case it ever should be discovered). No passing star has been found which could have disturbed the cloud within the last few millions of years either. It is now proposed that clouds of dust and galactic tides deflect comets towards the sun. Some of them happen to come close enough to major planets, particularly Jupiter, for their orbits to be changed and they become long period comets. Unfortunately, in any planetary encounter it would be as likely that the comet would be thrown out of the solar system and never seen again. Hopefully, subsequent interactions with the planets could further change the orbits and provide short period comets

Sadly for that idea, calculations suggest that the planets could not change the orbits in such a way as to provide short period comets, and today attention has shifted to another possible source of supply called "The Kuiper Belt" - named after another Dutch astronomer.

The Kuiper belt is a hypothesized shell of comets beyond the orbit of Neptune, but below the Oort cloud. Some objects have been detected beyond Neptune’s orbit, but they are very much bigger than comets. A few comet-sized objects have been inferred by tricky statistical methods but none positively identified. Altogether the Kuiper belt remains almost as speculative as the Oort cloud.

If one is to accept standard dogma’s great age then to explain the existence of short period comets the Kuper belt must contain thousands of millions of comets. To explain the long period comets the Oort cloud must contain a similarly vast number. It is worth noting what Carl Sagan, a staunch supporter of the Oort cloud, wrote in his book "Comet" :- "Many scientific papers are written each year about the Oort Cloud, its properties, its origin, its evolution. Yet there is not yet a shred of direct observational evidence for its existence."

It is accepted by faith. Again it appears that at least as much faith is required to believe in secular humanism’s time scale as in the Bible’s.

The standard hypothesis of stars considers original balls of gas (hydrogen and helium) which collapsed in on themselves due to gravity. As they contracted they became very hot, and nuclear reactions started inside them. Nuclear reactions gradually convert the star’s hydrogen to helium and helium to heavier elements. Over vast millions of years the star’s composition gradually changes. There are changes in the nuclear reactions and changes in size and temperature. This process of "stellar evolution" takes thousands of millions of years.

This story is beset by many problems. Calculations on gas clouds suggests that unless they are very cold (less than five degrees absolute) they should disperse, not contract. Observed clouds have a temperature far higher than this. It was suggested that perhaps a nearby supernova, or exploding star compresses the cloud to make it start contracting. Calculations show that such an explosion would make a cloud disperse, not contract. But there is another problem with this idea. The supernova was a star which also had to contract from a cloud of gas! An alternative hypothesis has dust within the cloud radiating heat away so that the temperature could drop low enough for contraction to start. Unfortunately the theory demands that the dust was formed in earlier stars, so once again stars cannot form without stars already existing!

Even if a cloud of gas and dust could be induced to contract under the influence of its own gravity there is no certainty that nuclear reactions would start inside it. Nuclear reactions were proposed by Arthur Eddingon, without any kind of proof, solely for the purpose of prolonging a star’s theoretical life-span. Until Eddington made his suggestion the best hypothesis available was that the sun and stars produce their heat and light by gravitational contraction. Helmholz and Kelvin had shown that all the heat and light observed could be produced this way. But if the vast ages of evolution were real, then the sun could not have provided power throughout that time. To have reached its present size after a thousands million years it would have had to start off so big that the earth would have been burned to a cinder. Alternatively, if the sun had been of a suitable size at the start of evolutionary history, then it would be a tiny remnant today.

The astronomers of the world, eager for a time frame which would allow the theory of evolution to remain plausible, accepted nuclear reactions without a clue as to how they could occur. Some time later a physicist, Hans Bethe, found himself journeying on a train in Germany with nothing to do. He amused himself for a few hours by working out the "proton-proton" reaction which could explain how hydrogen atoms might produce helium inside a star with the release of vast amounts of energy for thousands of millions of years. With no proof whatsoever this was taken by the scientific community as the established mechanism by which the sun (and stars) produce heat and light.

Later observations showed that the sun is pulsating. Analysis of those pulsations made it clear that conditions in the sun can be nothing like astronomers had assumed. In particular the center of the sun cannot be hot enough for Bethe’s proposed reactions to happen. Efforts were then made to prove that such reactions do, in fact, take place in the sun. The theory demands that these reactions produce neutrinos of a particular type. Detectors were built to detect such neutrinos coming from the sun. They failed to do so. Detectors were built to detect other kinds of neutrinos. Some were detected. In desperation many astrophysicists have assumed that the predicted neutrinos can somehow change into the observed neutrinos. Accepted atomic theory does not allow neutrinos to change kinds. There are too few of the wrong neutrinos anyway. Some have seriously suggested that reactions in the sun have temporarily switched off. Few seem prepared to accept the possibility that they never happened at all.

But even if they do happen, there are still problems. Sirius the brightest star in the sky has been observed for thousands of years. All the records show Sirius was a red giant until a thousand years ago. It is now blue-white. Around 1900 FG Saggitae was an inconspicuous hot star with a spectral temperature of 50,000 degrees and magnitude 13. During the next 60 years it cooled to about 8000 degrees. Having changed from blue to yellow in thirty five years it turned orange and faded away to a shadow of its original brightness in just a few more years. A few other stars have been observed to change almost as quickly. Rather surprisingly, astronomers take this in their stride, saying those stars must have just expanded and cooled rather quickly. Perhaps, but what does this do for the accepted theory of stellar evolution, which has such changes taking place over thousands of millions of (unobserved) years?

It takes a great deal of faith to believe in the astronomical time scale.

There are many more major credibility problems for conventional astronomical ages. I do not intend to look at any more in detail, but will skim over just a few.

The moon is receding from the earth. At the observed rate it would have been so close to the earth that it would have been torn to pieces by the earth’s gravity a fraction of its supposed age ago. Galaxies within clusters, and clusters of galaxies themselves are moving so quickly that they should have flown apart in a fraction of their supposed ages. There should be no galaxies or clusters of galaxies. Vast quantities of invisible matter (up to a hundred times as much as the observed mass of the universe!) have to be proposed to hold everything together for the supposed ages to be credible. Long and detailed searches for this invisible matter have been unsuccessful. Spiral galaxies are rotating about their centre. At the observed rate they should all have rotated so many times that they should have been smeared out into a flat disk and lost their spiral appearance. In fact they all show only one or two turns. Accepted theories demand that stars evolve (meaning "age") and should show definite trends in the observed elements detectable in them. They do not show the right composition. For example many bright blue stars, which are supposed to be young and should have more then the proposed primordial ratio of helium to hydrogen have up to a hundred times less.

In all these cases (and many more), to believe in the popular evolutionary time scale one has to believe assumptions and unobserved special conditions or phenomena. A great amount of faith is required. All astronomical observations fit in with the Biblical time scale with no such straining of the facts.

The just shall live by faith - but so shall the unbeliever!