Anita wrote:When we understand the scientific evidence we will find that it agrees with what the Bible teaches. The evidence is certainly consistent with a young earth.
Anita, I think you are right that the scientific evidence agrees with what the Bible teaches. However, I think you are mistaken about what the Bible teaches. The evidence is anything but consistent with a young earth.
The topic under discussion here concerned the interstellar clouds of hydrogen in Orion, the Orion Nebula, I believe. That stellar nursery is only a few thousand light years away (about 1500). The light from any processes occurring there now has had plenty of time to reach us. On the other hand, we know that small stars must shine as protosuns through Helmholtz contraction (gravitational collapse) roughly a million years before before their internal temperatures and pressures become high enough for nuclear fusion. Astrophysicists estimate our own beloved sun is about half way through its roughly nine billion year life cycle on the main sequence, before it collapses to a white dwarf. I learned recently that in only a billion years (instead of 4.5 billion) it should become hot enough to boil away earth's oceans and fry life. Our planet lies towards the inside of the present habitable zone around our sun, despite the cold polar seasons.
But let's look a bit further afield, just because now we can. In 1987 astronomers beheld the light of a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is just a bit outside our own Milky Way. It is probably not actually part of our local group, as the velocity of it and the Small Magellanic Cloud are high enough to send them off on their way. Our galaxy is gravitationally bound to the much larger and more impressive Andromeda Galaxy. We are currently hurtling towards each other, and will collide in another few billion years. This won't be our first collision either, as is evidenced by the streamers of stars connecting our galaxies. Of course, our galaxies might have just been created to appear as though they had once passed through each other billions of years ago, long before our own sun was born.
But what I really want to talk about is Sanduleak -69 207, which was the topic sentence of my previous paragraph. This was a bloated star in the LMC, surrounded by a ring of material about 6 light months out from some earlier supernova event. Both star and ring are circled by a pair of rings even further out. The whole effect is quite beautiful, and you can find plenty of really neat photos of SN1987A in Google images if you care to look.
The key fact about this big, bloated star was that in went kablooie. The light of that event reached us in 1987. Now, before the star blew apart, the distance to the LMC had been estimated between 50,000 and 200,000 light years. That is a pretty big variation, but by the early 1980s our equipment and improved so that most astronomers thought the distance was pretty close to 175,000 light years. Note--the LMC is fairly near by, Andromeda is over 2 million light years away, and we can count close to 100 billion galaxies scattered from us out about ten billion light years in any direction.
Well, what of SN1987A? SuperNova 1987a, A indicating the first one detected that year. I think astronomers quit using letters to designate supernovas because in the past few years the counts have shot up into the hundreds with improvements in our technology. Because of the ring, we could measure the distance to this star using simple trigonometry. We have the arc seconds between the star and ring. All we need more is the time for the light from the supernova event to strike the ring at right angles to us. This problem has been given to college astronomy students all over america. The star is right about 172,000 light years away. The margin of error is within the precision of our instrumentation--just a few percent.
Neutrinos began streaming into our underground detectors just a little bit before the supernova itself became visible. Since one could insist neutrinos are a form of light, one might argue that the speed of light could still have decreased over time, just in such a way that the light of the neutrinos still preceded it by the expected amount by the time it reached us. That argument is really far fetched, and then totally demolished by the prosaic matter from the star itself striking the inner ring, right on schedule at the velocity calculated. The speed of light, it seems, is fairly constant. It has not varied by more than a few millionths of a percent (within our ability to measure) over the past ten billion years.
If God created the universe 6000 years ago, then God created streams of neutrinos and light consistent with the explosion of a star in the direction of the LMC but only 6000 light years from earth. THAT smacks of deception. Or God could have created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, as the COBE and WMAP observatories clearly indicate, and just created our little earth 6000 years ago, burying terratons of evidence within it of a much older existence.
I'm not comfortable with either of those conjectures. To me it seems far simpler to realize that the truth of the Holy Scriptures does not in reality address the scientific origin of the earth and universe beyond.
