COMETS: SIGNS OF YOUTH - Comets’ short lifetimes and the absence of a plausible way to replenish them over billions of supposed years testify that our solar system is young, fully consistent with the Bible’s 6,000-year timescale. Comets are a reminder that since God’s Word has told us the truth about Earth’s history and the creation of the universe, we can also trust it to tell us the truth that God loves us, and if we turn from our sins and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ we have God’s gracious promise of salvation and eternal life. People throughout history have sometimes seen comets as portents of doom. However, Comets are indeed a sign of sorts, but not in the way many ancient people thought. Although comets are known for their long, beautiful tails, a tail isn’t necessary for an object to be a comet. Comets are defined as solar system bodies that have at least a temporary visible atmosphere, or coma, even if a tail isn’t present. Comets are comparatively small, with typical diameters of about 10 kilometers. They are composed of a mixture of rock, dust, and frozen ices, including water ice, and have been described as “dirty snowballs.” When a comet’s trajectory brings it close to the sun, solar radiation causes the ices to vaporize, and the escaping gases often carry dust along with them. The released dust and gases form a coma and usually two tails, one composed of charged gas particles and another composed of dust.

 

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Comets: Signs of Youth

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Comets’ short lifetimes and the absence of a plausible way to replenish them over billions of supposed years testify that our solar system is young, fully consistent with the Bible’s 6,000-year timescale. Comets are a reminder that since God’s Word has told us the truth about Earth’s history and the creation of the universe, we can also trust it to tell us the truth that God loves us, and if we turn from our sins and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ we have God’s gracious promise of salvation and eternal life

BY JAKE HEBERT, PH.D.

 

A comet in the night sky is an awe-inspiring sight (Figure 1).

People throughout history have sometimes seen comets as portents of doom.

However, God warned the people of Israel not to fear such signs in the heavens:

Thus says the LORD: “Do not learn the way of the Gentiles; do not be dismayed at the signs of heaven, for the Gentiles are dismayed at them.”

Comets are indeed a sign of sorts, but not in the way many ancient people thought.

Dirty Snowballs

Figure 1. Comet McNaught

Although comets are known for their long, beautiful tails, a tail isn’t necessary for an object to be a comet.

Comets are defined as solar system bodies that have at least a temporary visible atmosphere, or coma, even if a tail isn’t present.

Comets are comparatively small, with typical diameters of about 10 kilometers (six miles).

They are composed of a mixture of rock, dust, and frozen ices, including water ice, and have been described as “dirty snowballs.”

When a comet’s trajectory brings it close to the sun, solar radiation causes the ices to vaporize, and the escaping gases often carry dust along with them.

The released dust and gases form a coma and usually two tails, one composed of charged gas particles (ions) and another composed of dust.

The gas tail always points directly away from the sun because the ionized gas particles are pushed away from the sun by the solar radiation.

A dust tail isn’t always present, but when it is it’s curved because the heavier dust particles are not influenced as much by solar radiation (Figure 2).

Short Lifetimes

 Because material escapes from the comet nucleus during each approach toward the sun, the comet eventually loses all its volatile material.

At that point, the comet nucleus can no longer produce a coma or tail, and the comet won’t be visible even though its rocky core may still remain. A comet nucleus usually has enough volatile material to be continuously expelled for around 10,000 years.

Figure 2. Comet NEOWISE during this year’s appearance, with its 
bluish ion tail and white dust tail

The effective lifetimes of comets will vary depending on how often their orbits bring them near the sun, but these lifetimes are usually measured in only tens of thousands of years.

Secular scientists claim that comets are leftover fragments from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

If comet nuclei are billions of years old, why are thousands of comets still visible?

Creation scientists would argue that this is because both comets and our solar system are only about 6,000 years old.

If the solar system really is billions of years old, then new comets must somehow replace the old ones that die out.

Secular scientists have suggested that comets are replenished by reservoirs of comet nuclei.

Because different comets have different kinds of orbits, they think more than one such reservoir is needed.

Comet Types

Comets can be classified into two broad categories: long-period and short-period comets.

Long-period comets are those that take more than 200 years to orbit the sun.

They have very long, stretched-out orbits, and these orbits can be highly inclined to the ecliptic plane — the plane of Earth’s orbit around the sun.

Creationists think that God simply created these comets with very large orbits and that we are now seeing many of these long-period comets for the first time.

Short-period comets take less than 200 years to orbit the sun.

These comets can be further subdivided into two categories: Halley-type comets (HTCs) and Jupiter-type comets (JTCs).

HTCs are designated as such because they have orbital characteristics similar to those of the famous Halley’s Comet.

Their orbits are sometimes highly inclined to the ecliptic plane.

Some HTCs are said to have retrograde orbits because they orbit the sun “backwards” compared to the planets.

Their orbital periods are between 20 and 200 years.

JTCs have orbits that generally lie between Mars and Jupiter, and it’s thought their orbits are significantly and frequently influenced by Jupiter.

Their orbits tend to lie near the ecliptic plane, and they have orbital periods of less than 20 years.

The Kuiper Belt

Secular astronomers have proposed two or three different reservoirs of potential comet nuclei (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Secular scientists think the Kuiper Belt, a portion of the Kuiper Belt

 called the scattered disk, and the Oort cloud serve as sources for

 new comet nuclei. KBO refers to a specific Kuiper Belt Object.

One of these is a doughnut-shaped collection of bodies beyond the planet Neptune called the Kuiper Belt.

This is older terminology, and since these bodies orbit beyond Neptune they are often called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).

I use the older term here to clearly distinguish between this group of TNO bodies and another collection of TNOs called the scattered disk.

Because both Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and Jupiter-type comets tend to orbit near the ecliptic plane, the Kuiper Belt is usually said to be the source for JTCs.

It’s thought that gravitational nudges by Neptune can cause KBOs to move toward the sun, enabling them to become visible comets.

Figure 3. Secular scientists think the Kuiper Belt, a portion of the Kuiper Belt called the scattered disk, and the Oort cloud serve as sources for new comet nuclei. KBO refers to a specific Kuiper Belt Object.

However, it’s not clear that the Kuiper Belt contains enough material to serve as an adequate source for the JTCs.

Comet nuclei are generally hundreds of meters to tens of kilometers in diameter, with a few that are roughly 100 kilometers across.

But nearly all identified KBOs are at least 100 kilometers across, with some (like Pluto and the other dwarf planets) thousands of kilometers in diameter.

Nearly all observed KBOs are much too large to be comet nuclei.

Secular astronomers think collisions between larger KBOs can result in smaller objects that could serve as comet nuclei and that these smaller objects are too small and dim to be detected.

This may be reasonable, but the true number of smaller KBOs is “quite uncertain.”

The Scattered Disk

What about the Halley-type comets?

Scattered disk objects (SDOs) are objects beyond Neptune that can have more extreme elongated orbits with high inclinations to the plane of the solar system.

Their name is due to the fact that their extreme orbits are thought to be the result of “scattering” due to gravitational interactions with the giant gas planets.

Some scientists count the SDOs as part of the Kuiper Belt, while others consider them as distinct from it.

Because both SDOs and HTCs can have highly inclined orbits, secular astronomers used to think that the scattered disk was the source of HTCs.

However, they later concluded that the scattered disk contains only about a tenth of the material needed for it to act as a source for new HTCs.

For this reason, some astronomers now claim that the Oort cloud is the source for new HTCs in addition to being a source for long-period comets.

But one expert has acknowledged that the details of how this might work are “controversial.”

The Oort Cloud

The Oort cloud is thought to be an enormous cloud of trillions of icy comet nuclei.

It supposedly consists of an inner disk-like cloud of comet nuclei and a much larger outer spherical shell (Figure 3).

However, there is an obvious problem with the idea that the Oort cloud can act as a source for new comets, one that was acknowledged even by prominent secularists Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan: “There is not yet a shred of direct observational evidence for its [the Oort cloud’s] existence.”

The lack of observational evidence for the Oort cloud is the least of its problems.

Remember that secular astronomers think comets are leftovers from the solar system’s formation 4.6 billion years ago.

According to their theory, the comet nuclei that eventually ended up in the Oort cloud would have originally formed much closer to the sun.

Interactions with the planets then supposedly caused these comet nuclei to migrate to much greater distances from the sun to form the Oort cloud.

However, a computer simulation showed that most of the nuclei would have been destroyed during the migration process.

This would make the mass of the Oort cloud much less today than scientists’ estimates.

This may be one of the reasons experts have acknowledged that the standard Oort cloud theory is incapable of accounting for the observed number of long-period comets.

They have proposed that our sun formed near a cluster of other stars and that it somehow “stole” comets from these stars.

But as in the case of the Oort cloud itself, this idea is highly speculative.

Another problem with the Oort theory is that it tends to overpredict the number of returning long-period comets compared to the number of first-appearing long-period comets.

In order to bring the theory into alignment with observations, Jan Oort invoked an ad hoc “fading parameter.”

However, one author said, “Still, the uncertain nature of the fading parameter on which its [the Oort theory’s] success depends remains disconcerting.”

Definitely Young

Scientists were shocked to discover that the dumbbell-shaped Comet Hartley 2 still contains a large amount of carbon dioxide and that this CO₂ was outgassing from the comet nucleus.

Figure 4. Secular scientists were shocked to find that Comet Hartley 2 is still
outgassing carbon dioxide, even though it is supposedly billions of years old.

Its [Comet Hartley 2’s] nucleus contains an abundance of carbon dioxide (CO₂—or, in solid form, dry ice).

This is a volatile material — it burns [turns to gas] easily — and so scientists would expect much more of it to have burned away in the 4.5 billion years since the comet formed along with the rest of the solar system.

A news report said this presence of large amounts of carbon dioxide was “inexplicable.”

It’s not hard to see why. The abundance of CO₂ would require outgassing to be ridiculously slow for billions of years, or else Comet Hartley 2’s CO₂ content was replenished somehow.

Did CO₂ gas flow from interstellar space back inside the comet nucleus? It makes sense for CO₂ to be escaping from the comet nucleus to outer space but not for it to be flowing back in!

But if Comet Hartley 2 is just thousands of years old, the continued presence of volatile CO₂ in its interior is much easier to explain.

Conclusion

Comets’ short lifetimes and the absence of a plausible way to replenish them over billions of supposed years testify that our solar system is young, fully consistent with the Bible’s 6,000-year timescale.

Comets are a reminder that since God’s Word has told us the truth about Earth’s history and the creation of the universe, we can also trust it to tell us the truth that God loves us, and if we turn from our sins and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ we have God’s gracious promise of salvation and eternal life.

Dr. Hebert is Research Associate at the Institute for Creation Research and earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Dallas.

https://www.icr.org/article/comets-signs-of-youth/

 

THE STARDUST TRAIL - The underlying reason for space research is to explain the origin of the stars and planets without God having been involved. The ultimate hope is to find evidence of extraterrestrial life somewhere, for that would prove that life could evolve anywhere — not just on Earth. There is a lot of extraterrestrial life, of course - the Bible calls them angels! But the astro-scientists will not find any angels with their telescopes or space probes - neither will they find any other humans or humanoids out there. Physical life was specially created, and Earth was created uniquely to support that life - the stars were created for other purposes, not yet revealed - Big Bang cosmologists believe that our human bodies are essentially "stardust," composed of elements generated long ago in exploding stars which disbursed their dust into space. The trail began some 15 billion years ago in the primeval Big Bang, which first produced simple chemical elements, then eventually stars and galaxies and planets and people through aeons of evolution. This idea is not scientific. Scientists have never observed stars or planets evolve, so such ideas are essentially based on naturalistic speculation supported mostly by esoteric mathematics, so they are not scientific. The truth is that we don't understand star formation. There have been various theories of the evolution of the planets and their satellites, as well as the comets and asteroids.

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The Stardust Trail
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The underlying reason for space research is to explain the origin of the stars and planets without God having been involved. The ultimate hope is to find evidence of extraterrestrial life somewhere, for that would prove that life could evolve anywhere — not just on Earth. There is a lot of extraterrestrial life, of course - the Bible calls them angels! But the astro-scientists will not find any angels with their telescopes or space probes - neither will they find any other humans or humanoids out there. Physical life was specially created, and Earth was created uniquely to support that life - the stars were created for other purposes, not yet revealed

BY HENRY M. MORRIS, PH.D.  

Big Bang cosmologists believe that our human bodies are essentially "stardust," composed of elements generated long ago in exploding stars which disbursed their dust into space.

The trail began some 15 billion years ago in the primeval Big Bang, which first produced simple chemical elements, then eventually stars and galaxies and planets and people through aeons of evolution.

This idea is not scientific.

Scientists have never observed stars or planets evolve, so such ideas are essentially based on naturalistic speculation supported mostly by esoteric mathematics, so they are not scientific, by definition.

As far as the stars are concerned, Abraham Loeb (of the Harvard University Center for Astrophysics) has frankly acknowledged that scientists do not know how they formed.

The truth is that we don't understand star formation at a fundamental level.

The most favored theory at present is that the Big Bang explosion generated the simple elements hydrogen and helium, which eventually coalesced into the first simple stars.

These stars, known as Type-3 Stars, did not include any complex elements.

The latter had to be generated when some of this first group of stars exploded as supernovas.

From the resulting stardust evolved more complex stars and eventually planets and people.

The problem is that, out of the billions upon billions of stars in the observable universe, there do not seem to be any Type-3 Stars at all.

The first generation of stars likely formed when the universe was only a few million years old (though these Population III stars have not yet been identified).

It seems like we should see plenty of them if they ever existed, since all the other stars supposedly keep coming from them.

Be that as it may, we are more interested in our sun with its solar system.

There have been various theories of the evolution of the planets and their satellites, as well as the comets and asteroids.

Most of these theories have encountered insuperable obstacles, so that the current theory (of last resort, actually) is a set of catastrophic theories based on multiple impacts of various rock bodies.

The moon (to take a "close to home" example) is said to have originated in a gigantic impact on Earth.

Many models have been proposed for the formation of the Moon, but no one has succeeded in showing the formation satisfactorily.

The popular "giant impact" model states that a Mars-sized protoplanet hit the proto-Earth and generated a circumterrestrial debris disk from which the Moon accreted.

While this theory may have fewer problems than others, it appears extremely imaginative and quite incapable of proof. Furthermore, it does encounter one serious difficulty.

However, no reasonable means to rid the Earth/Moon system of the excess angular momentum has yet been proposed.

One scientist in this field seems about ready to give up hope that the origin of the moon can ever be explained, not to mention the other planets and satellites.

All in all, developing a theory of lunar origins that could make sense of data obtained from the Apollo lunar landing programme proved very difficult.

So much so, in fact, that when I took a class on our planetary system from Irvin Shapiro two decades ago, he joked that the best explanation was observational error — the moon did not exist.

The comets orbiting the sun present another problem. These bodies lose considerable mass at every pass around the sun. They cannot survive many orbits, and thus cannot be very old.

To get around this problem, evolutionists assume there is a vast cloud of hibernating comets out near the edge of the solar system, which releases new comets every so often.

This imaginary cloud is called the "Oort Cloud," named after the astronomer who proposed it. The problem is that there is no observational evidence such a cloud exists at all.

We have never actually "seen" the Oort Cloud . . .

We infer the existence and properties of the Oort Cloud . . . from . . . the steady trickle of long-period comets into the planetary system.

The underlying reason for space research is to explain the origin of the stars and planets without God having been involved.

The ultimate hope is to find evidence of extraterrestrial life somewhere, for that would prove, they say, that life could evolve anywhere — not just on Earth.

One hope is to locate some type of nonrandom radio signals from the stars.

Very elaborate radio telescopes have been built and monitored for years hoping to catch them. But this effort has been a waste of much money.

. . . scientists are systematically scrutinizing a thousand nearby sun-like stars for the faint signal that would betray intelligent habitation.

So far, they have found nothing — not a single extraterrestrial peep. . . we are, to our knowledge, still alone in a vast cosmos.

Nevertheless, NASA is still hoping to find some evidence of extraterrestrial life — if not human life on some far-off planet, then at least microbial life on a nearby planet.

The only candidate remaining in the solar system is Mars.

Although Mars seems to be devoid of any life at all, they still are searching for evidence that it used to be there.

Two years ago, NASA generated global publicity by announcing they had found such evidence — a Martian rock with fossilized bacteria that had somehow traveled to Earth and landed in Antarctica.

This claim has been well debunked by now.

Eighteen months after David S. McKay and his colleagues . . . raised eyebrows with their claim . . . the team has made few converts . . . its critics have published dozens of new observations they believe make that theory increasingly improbable. . . .

On the other hand, this sensational claim of Martian life has been immensely successful in one sense.

Scientists now working on . . . the possibility of extraterrestrial life are funded at levels that two years ago would have been unimaginable.

Had NASA's publicity machine not turned McKay's paper into a global media event, this largesse would never have been granted.

What is NASA up to? Two years ago, the agency thought it had discovered life on Mars and set the world ablaze with talk of a Universe populated by aliens.

Now it has discovered water on the moon and the world is already planning holidays at lunar resorts. . . .

But we should not be cynical. NASA needs periodic blazes of publicity to keep the U.S. Congress interested in funding space exploration.

The most recent NASA project has been the widely publicized adventure of sending an ex-senator and ex-astronaut (now 77 years old) back on a space mission, ostensibly to research the effects of space travel on the aging process.

The public-relations boost for NASA has again been enormous.

There is a lot of extraterrestrial life, of course. The Bible calls them angels!

These are specially created beings "sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation" (Hebrews 1:14).

But the astro-scientists will not find any angels with their telescopes or space probes. Neither will they find any other humans or humanoids out there.

Physical life was specially created, and Earth was created uniquely to support that life.

The stars were created for other purposes, not yet revealed.

"The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD'S: but the earth hath He given to the children of men" (Psalm 115:16).

Evolutionary scientists would be well advised to "hit the sawdust trail" that leads to Christ and forget about the imaginary stardust trail that they think led to life.

* Dr. Morris is Founder and President Emeritus of ICR.

The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) wants people to know that God’s Word can be trusted in everything it speaks about—from how and why we were made, to how the universe was formed, to how we can know God and receive all He has planned for us.

After 50 years of ministry, ICR remains a leader in scientific research within the context of biblical creation. Founded by Dr. Henry Morris in 1970, ICR exists to conduct scientific research within the realms of origins and Earth history, and then to educate the public both formally and informally through professional training programs, through conferences and seminars around the country, and through books, magazines, and media presentations.

https://www.icr.org/article/stardust-trail/

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