planets.
According to the cloud-collapse theory, the Sun should indeed be spinning faster than any solar-system body. When a figure skater draws in her arms during a spin, she spins faster and faster. The fancy name for this is conservation of angular momentum, which just means that a big thing will spin faster if it shrinks.
This happened to our proto-solar-system cloud when it collapsed, too. It spun faster as it collapsed. Since the Sun was at the center of the cloud, it should have sped up the most. But, apparently contrary to this theory, the Sun currently spins only once a month. This is the key to the last of these creationist arguments about the solar system.
Before it formed, the solar system was basically a giant cloud of dust and gas, roughly spherical in shape. As it collapsed, it began to spin, and this caused it to flatten out. The planets formed
The creationists, as usual, are oversimplifying the problem. The universe is many things, but one thing it isn’t is simple. However, it usually makes sense, so if you see something that doesn’t make sense, look around. The solution may be blowing right past you.
In this case, that’s literally true. The Sun is constantly blowing a wind. This solar wind flows from the Sun’s surface at a rate of about a thousand tons of gas per second. But the Sun is pretty big and has mass to lose. It can easily shed a few billion tons a year and hardly notice the difference.
The solar wind is made up of charged particles — electrons and protons. Left to themselves, they would blow straight out from the Sun into infinity. But they are not left to themselves. The Sun itself has a pretty hefty magnetic field, and this field rotates with the Sun. As it spins, the sun drags the particles along with it. This in turn acts like a brake on the Sun’s rotation, slowing its spin.
This isn’t too difficult to understand. Imagine standing in your front yard with a big trash bag in your hands. Open it up, hold it out to your side, and start spinning. The bag acts like a parachute, scooping up air and slowing you down. The exact same thing is happening to the Sun. The magnetic field is like a huge parachute, scooping up particles. The “air” — the particles in the solar wind — is very tenuous, and the Sun is large and heavy, but this drag (despite what the creationists might think) has had a long time in which to work. Over 4.5 billion years it has quite possibly slowed the Sun substantially to its current rather stately monthly rotation. While this theory has not been conclusively proven, it remains a leading contender to explain the angular momentum problem. There are other theories as well, such as the idea that the Sun lost most of its angular momentum very early on, as a protostar. It may have shed a lot of its mass through long episodes of a sort of supersolar wind. While astronomers are not totally sure which of these ideas is the correct solution, the fact remains that there
There are not enough old supernovas to justify an old galaxy.
Of all the creationist arguments involving astronomy, this one is my favorite. Basically, it goes like this: some stars, at the ends of their lives, explode. This doesn’t happen terribly often, and only stars far more massive than the Sun ever explode in this way. When they do, it’s called a supernova.
The explosion is so bright that it can outshine entire galaxies and be seen clear across the universe, and it is so violent that the outer layers of the star are flung outward at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. This rapidly expanding cloud of debris, called the ejecta, or sometimes the remnant, can glow for many tens or even hundreds of thousands of years.
You can see where this is going. Creationists take exception to the idea of old supernova remnants, of course, since according to them, none can be older than 6,000 years. As a matter of fact, a relatively new and bold claim by the creationists is that there is no supernova remnant older than at most 10,000 years. This argument has been used by noted creationist Keith Davies, and is also used by the Institute for Creation Research itself. They list it prominently at their web site, and it carries a lot of their weight. If it’s wrong, then so are they.
It’s wrong. Davies goes through a tremendous number of observations and calculations to show that, according to mainstream science, there should be lots of very old supernova remnants in the sky, yet none is to be found. He uses lots of math and fancy graphics to prove his point.
The funny thing is that he is missing the forest for the trees, so to speak. I could go into just as much detail showing why there really
According to the creationists, this (supposed) lack of old remnants indicates the universe is young. But remember, the remnants form when a star goes supernova
That’s why this is one of my favorite creationist arguments. In this case, they are using a sort of sleight-of- hand, a magician’s trick to distract you by using complex mathematics, when in fact the argument rests on a fatally flawed premise. You don’t need to do any fancy math at all; a little logic destroys their argument.
Incidentally, as an indication of Davies’s misunderstanding of all this, he has an image of a star on his web page that he has labeled as a supernova. It isn’t. It’s really just a plain old star that’s been overexposed, a fact that is easy to verify by simply opening nearly any astronomy textbook. Ironically, the very first thing you see on his (very long) web page shows that he doesn’t understand what a supernova is at all.
The creationists’ attack on science is a serious issue. It goes far beyond bad astronomy. Indeed, astronomy is only the most recent of repeated attacks on mainstream science that they have initiated. Their feelings about biology are well-known in the United States. In 1999 the Kansas School Board discouraged the teaching of biological evolution in middle and high schools by removing all statewide standardized testing about it. This was accomplished because the school board had been packed with creationists in the previous election. Before the election, the creationist candidates had downplayed their religious ties. They also relied on the voters being too apathetic to research their candidates’ histories. That gamble paid off, and the result was a creationist school board, a nationwide controversy, and a terrible embarrassment for the Kansas — and American — educational system.
Perhaps more frightening were the reactions of other politicians to this. Several contenders in the 2000 presidential election were sympathetic to the board’s decision, without any understanding of the lack of scientific reasoning behind it.
One of my favorite phrases from the Bible is, “The truth shall set you free.” Ironically, creationists don’t want you to know the truth. They want you to know what
A happy addendum: upon the next election, the public having learned of their true agenda, three of the creationist Kansas School Board members were voted out of office. One spent an unprecedented amount of money in advertising and was ousted, anyway. The new board quickly reinstated teaching evolution in the curriculum. Like science, sometimes even the political process is selfcorrecting.
20.
