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Top: The GLEAM/GLEAM-X view of the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: S. Mantovanini & the GLEAM-X team
Bottom: The same area of the Milky Way in visible light.
Bottom: The same area of the Milky Way in visible light.
Credit: Axel Mellinger, milkywaysky.com
A paper published yesterday in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia presents a stunning new view of the Milky Way galaxy. It was produced by astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and shows the Milky Way in low-frequency colour images. It is a useful reminder of the stark difference between the Bible’s description of the universe and the real thing.
The Bronze Age authors of the Bible could only write about what they knew — and, manifestly, that wasn’t very much — but then they could never have guessed that some charlatan at some point in the future was going to put their childish tales into a book and declare it to be the word of a creator god. If anything was ever destined to be a self-falsifying claim, it was that.
But if it had been the word of an omnibenevolent supernatural deity with a vital message for humankind, not only would it have been so perfectly written that it could not possibly be misunderstood or misinterpreted, it would also have contained information not then available to its scribes, so there could be no doubt about its authenticity.
Yet there is nothing in the Bible that was not already known in the Bronze Age, and a great deal of what was believed in those days which has since turned out to be badly wrong. In fact, it is true to say that if the Bible were discovered today for the first time, any competent historian could date it and probably place its authorship geographically by the scientific ignorance it contains.
For example, there is nothing about micro-organisms, atoms, electricity, plate tectonics, galaxies, the vastness of space, or the fact that some of those little points of light the authors thought were stuck to a dome over the small, flat Earth were actually galaxies containing half a trillion or more suns. Nothing. Not a single thing that we could point to and say, “Wow! Only a creator god could have known that in the Bronze Age!” Instead, we have a god who supposedly designed and created the human body but believes we think with our hearts and that a clone made from a man will produce a woman.
Imagine if the first chapter of Genesis had been written like Eric Idle’s Galaxy Song from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life:
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
It would certainly be hard for sceptics to point to that and claim it wasn’t written at least by someone who knew far more than we could expect primitive Bronze Age pastoralists to have known.And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
© Universal Music Publishing Group.
Of course, it is far more likely that it would have been written by some alien visitors from another planet than by a creator god who self-assembled out of nothing, but that’s another matter. The point is, the Bible could have contained new information of that order and would have done so if it had really been written by a god who wanted to give us a vital message but first felt it needed to establish its credentials — which appears to be the entire purpose of Genesis 1 and 2.
As it was, the best the authors could come up with was a description of the universe as a small, flat planet with a dome over it, that is childish in its naïvety and serves only to show that the claim of divine authorship is certainly bogus.
So, back to the new images of the Milky Way. How they were produced is explained in a news release from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
Astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have created the largest low-frequency radio colour image of the Milky Way ever assembled.
This spectacular new image captures the Southern Hemisphere view of our Milky Way galaxy, revealing it across a wide range of radio wavelengths, or ‘colours’ of radio light.
It provides astronomers with new ways to explore the birth, evolution, and death of stars in our Galaxy.
Silvia Mantovanini, a PhD student at the Curtin University node of ICRAR, dedicated 18 months and approximately 1M CPU hours to construct the image by using the supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre to process and compile the data from two extensive surveys.
The surveys were conducted using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia.
The MWA telescope consists of 4,096 spider-like antennas, located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, on Wajarri Country in Western Australia
These were the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) and GLEAM-X (GLEAM eXtended) surveys, respectively conducted over 28 nights in 2013 and 2014, and 113 nights from 2018 to 2020.
The new image, which focuses on our own Galaxy, offers twice the resolution, ten times the sensitivity, and covers twice the area compared to the previous GLEAM image released in 2019.
This significant improvement in resolution, sensitivity and sky coverage allows for a more detailed and comprehensive study of the Milky Way, providing astronomers with a wealth of new data and insights.
Silvia Mantovanini, with the galactic core in the backgroundThis vibrant image delivers an unparalleled perspective of our Galaxy at low radio frequencies. It provides valuable insights into the evolution of stars, including their formation in various regions of the Galaxy, how they interact with other celestial objects, and ultimately their demise.
Silvia Mantovanini, first author
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research
Curtin University
Bentley, WA, Australia.
Ms Mantovanini’s research focuses on supernova remnants, the expanding clouds of gas and energy left behind when a star explodes at the end of its life. Although hundreds of these remnants have been discovered so far, astronomers suspect that thousands more are waiting to be found.
The image allows them to distinguish between the gas surrounding new stars and that left behind by dead ones, revealing clearer patterns in the cosmic landscape.
You can clearly identify remnants of exploded stars, represented by large red circles. The smaller blue regions indicate stellar nurseries where new stars are actively forming.
Silvia Mantovanini
The image may also help unravel the mysteries surrounding pulsars in our Galaxy. By measuring the brightness of pulsars at different GLEAM-X frequencies, astronomers hope to gain a deeper understanding of how these enigmatic objects emit radio waves and where they exist within our Galaxy.
Associate Professor Natasha Hurley-Walker from the same ICRAR team, who is the principal investigator of the GLEAM-X survey, emphasised how this is a big step forward in studying the Milky Way’s structure.This low-frequency image allows us to unveil large astrophysical structures in our Galaxy that are difficult to image at higher frequencies. No low-frequency radio image of the entire Southern Galactic Plane has been published before, making this an exciting milestone in astronomy. Only the world’s largest radio telescope, the SKA Observatory’s SKA-Low telescope, set to be completed in the next decade on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia, will have the capacity to surpass this image in terms of sensitivity and resolution.
Associate Professor Hurley-Walker, co-author
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research
Curtin University
Bentley, WA, Australia.
The surveys involved hundreds of hours of data collection using the MWA radio telescope located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. The ICRAR researchers catalogued an impressive 98,000 radio sources across the Galactic Plane visible from the southern hemisphere, showcasing a diverse mix of pulsars, planetary nebulae, compact HII regions – which are dense, ionised gas clouds in space – and distant galaxies unrelated to the Milky Way.
Publication:
And this is the real problem for creationism. The universe we actually observe, measure, and map bears no resemblance whatsoever to the tiny, dome-covered world imagined by Bronze Age storytellers. It is vast beyond comprehension, structured on scales of hundreds of thousands of light-years, filled with galaxies numbering in the trillions, and governed by physical laws that were entirely unknown until the last few centuries. None of that sits comfortably with the claim that Genesis is a divinely inspired account of cosmic origins.
The new radio images of the Milky Way are not just aesthetically striking; they are a visual demonstration of how science advances by observation, measurement, and testable explanation. They fit seamlessly into an evolutionary and cosmological framework that has grown steadily more accurate over time. No ad hoc excuses, no appeals to magic, and no special pleading are required. By contrast, the biblical cosmology has had to be endlessly reinterpreted, allegorised, or quietly ignored as each new discovery makes its literal meaning more obviously untenable.
So while creationists continue to insist that their ancient texts contain hidden scientific insights, the evidence tells a very different story. The Bible describes a universe exactly as ignorant Bronze Age pastoralists would have imagined it. Modern astronomy, by contrast, reveals a universe so rich, complex, and vast that it would have been utterly inconceivable to them. If a creator god really wanted to establish the authenticity of its message, it missed an open goal. What we actually have is a book that advertises its human origins on every page.
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