Bible Blunders - The Ignorant Authors Of Genesis

Panels a and b show early images of the visible appearance of Uranus and Neptune reconstructed from Voyager 2 ISS images in 1986 and 1989, respectively, showing Uranus to be pale blue-green, and Neptune dark blue (PIA18182 and PIA01492, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech). While these early Uranus images were close to ‘true’ colour, the Neptune images were actually stretched and enhanced. Panels c and d show more recent reconstructions of the true colours of these planets, showing them to be more similarly coloured.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Björn Jónsson,

https://www.planetary.org/articles/uranus-neptune-color-difference

Voyager 2/ISS images of Uranus and Neptune released shortly after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1986 and 1989, respectively, compared with a reprocessing of the individual filter images in this study to determine the best estimate of the true colours of these planets.

Credit: Professor Patrick Irwin, University of Oxford.

New images reveal what Neptune and Uranus really look like | University of Oxford

You will search the Bible in vain for any mention of the planets of the solar system, let alone a description of them, and the only description of Earth is so laughably childish it's incredible that anyone could take it seriously.

The reason for that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the scientific ignorance of Bronze Age people, but it's a measure of how far science has taken us since those times, and especially since the European Enlightenment when religion first began to lose its suffocating grip on European culture.

The astounding thing is that there are people alive today, living in technologically advanced countries with modern medicines, skyscrapers, satellite communications and navigation system, the Internet, air transport, nuclear power and space exploration, who still believe those simple people from the fearful infancy of our species had a better understanding of the universe than the scientists on whose discoveries their technological society is based.

For example, astronomers are now in the position of being able to have informed debates about the details of planets such as Neptune and Uranus because we have put instruments into space that can send back accurate data to inform those debates. We can now see that what the simple authors or Genesis thought were little lights stuck on a dome over a flat Earth are in reality large planets orbiting a sun which, unlike the description of it in Genesis, is not hanging from the same dome the planets are stuck to, but is a massive body at the centre of a planetary system in one of hundreds of billions of similar suns and planetary systems in one of maybe a trillion other galaxies, none of which would be affected by earthquakes on Earth, let alone fall down when they could be trampled on by a giant goat! [sic] (Daniel 8:10). (Seriously! There really are grown adults who believe that!)

An example of this informed debate was published open access recently in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The research is described in an Oxford University News release:

Neptune is fondly known for being a rich blue and Uranus green – but a new study has revealed that the two ice giants are actually far closer in colour than typically thought. The research, led by Professor Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics, has been published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Professor Irwin and his team found that both planets are in fact a similar shade of greenish blue, despite the commonly-held belief that Neptune is a deep azure and Uranus has a pale cyan appearance.

However, astronomers have long known that most modern images of the two planets do not accurately reflect their true colours. The misconception arose because images captured of both planets during the 20th century – including by NASA’s Voyager 2 mission, the only spacecraft to fly past these worlds – recorded images in separate colours.

The single-colour images were later recombined to create composite colour images, which were not always accurately balanced to achieve a “true” colour image, and – particularly in the case of Neptune – were often made “too blue”. In addition, the early Neptune images from Voyager 2 were strongly contrast enhanced to better reveal the clouds, bands, and winds that shape our modern perspective of Neptune.

Professor Irwin said: ‘Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in a form closer to “true” colour, those of Neptune were, in fact, stretched and enhanced, and therefore made artificially too blue.’

‘Even though the artificially-saturated colour was known at the time amongst planetary scientists – and the images were released with captions explaining it – that distinction had become lost over time. Applying our model to the original data, we have been able to reconstitute the most accurate representation yet of the colour of both Neptune and Uranus.’

In the new study, the researchers used data from Hubble Space Telescope’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. In both instruments, each pixel is a continuous spectrum of colours. This means that STIS and MUSE observations can be unambiguously processed to determine the true apparent colour of Uranus and Neptune.

The researchers used these data to re-balance the composite colour images recorded by the Voyager 2 camera, and also by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). This revealed that Uranus and Neptune are actually a rather similar shade of greenish blue. The main difference is that Neptune has a slight hint of additional blue, which the model reveals to be due to a thinner haze layer on that planet.

The study also provides an answer to the long-standing mystery of why Uranus’s colour changes slightly during its 84-year orbit of the Sun.

Voyager 2/ISS images of Uranus and Neptune released shortly after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1986 and 1989, respectively, compared with a reprocessing of the individual filter images in this study to determine the best estimate of the true colours of these planets.

Credit: Patrick Irwin, University of Oxford.

The authors came to their conclusion after first comparing images of the ice giant to measurements of its brightness, which were recorded by the Lowell Observatory in Arizona from 1950 – 2016 at blue and green wavelengths. These measurements showed that Uranus appears a little greener at its solstices (i.e. summer and winter), when one of the planet’s poles is pointed towards our star. But during its equinoxes – when the Sun is over the equator – it has a somewhat bluer tinge.

Part of the reason for this was known to be because Uranus has a highly unusual spin. It effectively spins almost on its side during its orbit, meaning that during the planet’s solstices either its north or south pole points almost directly towards the Sun and Earth. This is important because any changes to the reflectivity of the polar regions would therefore have a big impact on Uranus’s overall brightness when viewed from our planet.

The planetary group in Oxford has had a long history of involvement in the exploration of the solar system’s giant planets, including the Galileo mission to Jupiter; the Cassini/Huygen missions to Saturn; and ground-based observations using some of the world’s largest telescopes. Most recently of all, we are currently analysing the fantastic new data of Uranus from the James Webb Space Telescope. This is proving quite a challenge to reconcile with the planetary atmospheric models we have developed to simulate existing observations of Uranus. But then science is meant to be challenging - it wouldn’t be fun if it was too easy!

Professor Patrick Irwin, lead author
Department of Physics
University of Oxford, UK

What astronomers were less clear about is how or why this reflectivity differs. This led the researchers to develop a model which compared the spectra of Uranus’s polar regions to its equatorial regions.

It found that the polar regions are more reflective at green and red wavelengths than at blue wavelengths, partly because methane, which is red absorbing, is about half as abundant near the poles than the equator.

However, this wasn’t enough to fully explain the colour change so the researchers added a new variable to the model in the form of a “hood” of gradually thickening icy haze which has previously been observed over the summer, sunlit pole as the planet moves from equinox to solstice. Astronomers think this is likely to be made up of methane ice particles. When simulated in the model, the ice particles further increased the reflection at green and red wavelengths at the poles, offering an explanation as to why Uranus is greener at the solstice.

Professor Irwin said: “This is the first study to match a quantitative model to imaging data to explain why the colour of Uranus changes during its orbit. In this way, we have demonstrated that Uranus is greener at the solstice due to the polar regions having reduced methane abundance but also an increased thickness of brightly scattering methane ice particles.”

Dr Heidi Hammel, of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), who has spent decades studying Neptune and Uranus but was not involved in the study, said: “The misperception of Neptune’s colour, as well as the unusual colour changes of Uranus, have bedevilled us for decades. This comprehensive study should finally put both issues to rest.”

ABSTRACT

We present a quantitative analysis of the seasonal record of Uranus’s disc-averaged colour and photometric magnitude in Strömgren b and y filters (centred at 467 and 551 nm, respectively), recorded at the Lowell Observatory from 1950 to 2016, and supplemented with HST/WFC3 observations from 2016 to 2022. We find that the seasonal variations of magnitude can be explained by the lower abundance of methane at polar latitudes combined with a time-dependent increase of the reflectivity of the aerosol particles in layer near the methane condensation level at 1 – 2 bar. This increase in reflectivity is consistent with the addition of conservatively scattering particles to this layer, for which the modelled background haze particles are strongly absorbing at both blue and red wavelengths. We suggest that this additional component may come from a higher proportion of methane ice particles. We suggest that the increase in reflectivity of Uranus in both filters between the equinoxes in 1966 and 2007, noted by previous authors, might be related to Uranus’s distance from the Sun and the production rate of dark photochemical haze products. Finally, we find that although the visible colour of Uranus is less blue than Neptune, due to the increased aerosol thickness on Uranus, and this difference is greatest at Uranus’s solstices, it is much less significant than is commonly believed due to a long-standing misperception of Neptune’s ‘true’ colour. We describe how filter-imaging observations, such as those from Voyager-2/ISS and HST/WFC3, should be processed to yield accurate true colour representations.

Patrick G J Irwin, Jack Dobinson, Arjuna James, Nicholas A Teanby, Amy A Simon, Leigh N Fletcher, Michael T Roman, Glenn S Orton, Michael H Wong, Daniel Toledo, Santiago Pérez-Hoyos, Julie Beck,
Modelling the seasonal cycle of Uranus’s colour and magnitude, and comparison with Neptune,
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 527, Issue 4, February 2024, Pages 11521–11538, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad3761

Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Whoever wrote Genesis clearly did it for a purpose - to communicate what he or she thought was an accurate description of the universe and to tell the campfire tales that seemed to explain how it came about. However, if the author had been the omniscient creator god that some people now like to believe, it couldn't possibly have been intending to describe the universe as it really is, because it is manifestly ludicrously naïve.

It is so badly wrong that even calling is some sort of incomprehensible metaphor or allegory doesn't make it any better. There is no possible way any of it can be interpreted as describing Neptune and Uranus, or even a planetary system within one of trillions of galaxies. It is just plainly and unarguably wrong on almost every imaginable level. So, Genesis was either written by someone intending to mislead us or it was written by a naïve ignoramus pretending to be an expert on a subject about which he or she was completely ignorant.

So, creationists and Bible literalists need to decide, was the author of Genesis a deceiver or an ignoramus?

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