This article is best read on a laptop, desktop, or tablet
Analysing the cosmic microwave background in high definition has enabled researchers to confirm a simple model of the universe, ruling out many competing alternatives.
Creationists today face a distinct challenge compared to their predecessors from one or two centuries ago. They must continually devise ways to ignore or dismiss the relentless flow of scientific evidence disproving their beliefs, while simultaneously rationalizing the complete lack of evidence supporting claims of a young Earth, special creation through supernatural means, or the existence of a creator capable of producing a universe from nothing.
Individuals with a normal degree of intellectual honesty, when confronted with overwhelming evidence against their beliefs and a lack of supportive evidence, would naturally see this as grounds for doubt and reassessment. Creationists, however, appear undeterred, convinced that their personal beliefs override scientific evidence without the necessity for evidential justification.
Compounding their difficulties, scientists recently announced a significant advancement: they have mapped the cosmic microwave background radiation—the residual echo of the Big Bang—in unprecedented detail. Utilizing data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, this new research reveals conditions in the universe as they existed only 380,000 years after the Big Bang, roughly 13.8 billion years ago.
On the scale of a human lifetime, this is the equivalent of a photograph of a now middle-aged person, taken one hour after they were born, and, in a confirmation of the principle of Occam's Razor, the simplest model is conformed as the correct model.
A point I never tire of making because it contrasts so vividly what the authors of the Bible thought the Universe was like and what science is showing us it is really like, is the ludicrously naive description of a small, flat planet with a dome over it, with the moon, sun and starts attached to the dome.
Don't take my word for it. Open your Bible and read the first few pages:
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1.6-10)
And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.(Genesis 1.16-18)
How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.
Now compare that with the view of just a small fragment of the universe that the European Space Agency's space telescope, Euclid, has revealed today:
It's one thing for creationists to dismiss evidence of life on Earth hundreds of millions, or even a billion or two years before the so-called 'Creation Week' by misrepresenting dating methods and making the absurd claim that the Universe is so finely tuned for life that altering just one parameter slightly would render life impossible, while also claiming that radioactive decay rates were much higher during 'Creation Week', making radiometric dating inaccurate by orders of magnitude.
However, it's quite another to argue that the speed of light was much slower in the past, which would mean that objects appearing to be billions of light-years away are actually much younger than we observe them today.
But a ludicrous and false argument which is not easy to spot by the scientifically illiterate fools that creationists target, was seen by creationists as any reason not to try to get away with it on a different audience.
So, if they don't simply ignore this discovery, it will be interesting to see which lies the creation cult uses to dismiss it. It is the discovery of a galaxy, designated JADES-GS-z14-0) from just 300 million years post Big Bang, discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
This discovery, along with the fact that it is chemically complex, challenges the standard model for galaxy formation as well as the synthesis of 'heavy' elements (i.e., heavier that hydrogen, helium and lithium) because JADES-GS-z14-0 shows evidence of substantial quantities of oxygen. The standard model explains that heavier elements are formed in the end-stages of the life of a sun when its hydrogen supply has all been used up and it collapses under its own gravity. This high gravity forces helium nuclei together to form the heavier elements. When the sun finally explodes in a supernova these elements are thrown into space supplying the next generation os stars with these higher elements.
Q. How do we know the Bible could not possibly have been written by the god described in it?
A. The Bible describes the god it purports to have been inspired by as all-knowing, yet there is a great deal the Bible gets wrong, and even more that is left out. Clearly, whoever wrote it was ignorant of a great deal and almost all of what little they thought they knew they got hopelessly wrong.
For example, the opening few verses of Genesis make it plain that the authors thought the Universe consisted of a small, flat planet, on which they and everything they knew about lived. This planet had a dome over it from which the sun and moon were hung and in which the stars were embedded. The Bible even described how these stars could be shaken loose during earthquakes whereupon they would fall down to Earth.
This description of the universe bears no resemblance to the real universe and is clearly a description of what someone standing on a hill in Canaan thought his universe consisted of. It could scarcely be further from the truth.
There is simply no reason for an omniscient god to have got it so wrong; it's not even of the category of a 'lie to children', like the planetary model of an atom, designed to foster understanding of some of the properties of atoms without the complication of having to understand some quantum physics. The small, flat planet with a dome over it at the centre of the universe provides nothing by way of a useful model with which we can explain observed phenomena.
It is wrong, plainly and simply, and as such has served throughout the centuries to confuse and mislead, to endarken rather than to enlighten us.
No matter how much you insist that words meant something different in those days, or the description is a poetic allegory or a metaphor the meaning of which is beyond us, the early verses of the Bible clearly and unambiguously describe a universe consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it with the sun, moon and stars stuck to the underside of the dome.
This, of course, is a childlike description of what the authors saw as they looked up into the sky and saw what looked like a dome, and Earth was more or less flat, give or take a few low hills, so that is what, in their child-like naivety, they described:
How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1.6-10
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1.14-18
Now, as we learn more about the Universe as we develop increasingly sophisticated scientific instruments for examining it, we discover just how childishly naïve the Bible's authors were and so show to anyone interested in truth that the Bible could not possibly have been written or inspired by the creator god described in it, unless that god wanted to mislead us so that it would take humanity another three thousand years or more to discover its lies - and what would have been the point of that?
Mind you, the same creator god could have told us about germs, atoms or electricity or how to make a steam engine or a motor car, but either chose not to or didn't know about those things, because the people who invented it didn't know about those things either. What 'science' there is in the Bible is no better than the primitive understanding of Bronze Age pastoralists.
The Middle Eastern Bronze Age pastoralists who made up the Hebrew creation myths that later found themselves bound up in a book declared to be the inerrant word of a god, were probably aware of the planet Mars.
Certainly, the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans were and even named it after one of their gods - Nergal, Her Dashur, Ares and Mars, respectively. Because of its red colour, it was associated with blood and, by extension, war and violence.
But of course, the authors of Genesis thought it was stuck to the dome over their small flat planet, so they assumed it was made during 'Creation Week' and so had as little knowledge of its history as they had of their own planet - i.e., none at all. Had they realised Mars had water forming oceans, lakes and rivers 3 billion years earlier (they didn't even have a word for a number so large), they could have made up a slightly more plausible creation myth, at least as far as a time-scale is concerned.
But of course, as a small red light stuck to the dome, they had no more idea than fly how it got there, why it looked red or what it could tell them about planetary orbits. Although they don't even give it a mentions, presumably they must have had some inkling that it was different to the other little lights as it 'wandered' over the undersurface of the dome, like some of the other little lights - magical mystery, probably involving angels or other magic spirits, no doubt.
But what was it exactly that changed Mars from being a wet planet, with an atmosphere and probably suitable for life to evolve on, to being a cold, dry, unsuitable, even hostile place, where life as we know it could not exist, certainly on its surface or as advanced multicellular organisms.
I know I'm always writing about things that happened before creationism's mythical 'Creation Week', but the problem is, almost everything that happened happened then. 99.9975% of Earth's history happened then, for example, and far more of the Universe's, since the Universe is some 3-4 times as old as Earth and an awful lot happened between the Big Bang and the formation of the sun and its planetary system.
And so, true to form, this is about the time 466 million years ago, when, according to the findings of three researchers from Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, led by Professor Andrew G. Thomkins, Earth had a ring system, somewhat like those of Jupiter and Saturn. They believe the ring was composed of the debris of a large asteroid that passed close enough to Earth to be broken up by gravitational tidal forces.
The result was a sudden plunge into an ice age and a period of intense bombardment with meteorites lasting millions of years and producing an otherwise difficult to explain pattern of impact craters.
Creationist have been fooled by their cult to believe that the Universe is 'fine-tuned' for life and that this 'fine-tuning' is proof of their particular god and its particular holy book.
This is a blatant false dichotomy fallacy; even if it could be proved to be true by showing that the various (and usually ill-defined) parameters could have other values it does not follow that a randomly designated god is responsible for 'tuning' them.
It's also a blasphemy, if creationists did but realise it, because it assumes their supposedly omnipotent god is itself constrained by the fundamental laws of chemistry and physics and could only work to create life within very narrow constraints - which implies a higher power to set that constraint.
How many black holes are there in the known Universe?
Estimating the exact number of black holes in the known Universe is challenging, but astronomers have made some educated guesses based on our current understanding.
Stellar-Mass Black Holes
Stellar-mass black holes, which form from the collapse of massive stars, are the most common type. Based on the number of stars in the Universe and the fraction of those stars that are massive enough to form black holes, it is estimated that there are around 100 million to 1 billion stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Given that the Milky Way is just one of about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable Universe, the number of stellar-mass black holes across the Universe could be in the range of to (a billion trillion to 10 billion trillion).
Supermassive Black Holes
Supermassive black holes, which exist at the centers of galaxies, are much rarer. Almost every galaxy with a significant size is thought to have a supermassive black hole at its center. This suggests there could be around 2 trillion supermassive black holes in the observable Universe, one for each galaxy.
Primordial Black Holes
There is also the theoretical possibility of primordial black holes, which might have formed in the early Universe. These could range in mass from very small to large and could number in the vast quantities, though their existence has not been confirmed.
Total Estimate
In total, combining these different types, the number of black holes in the observable Universe could be as high as or more. This estimate is still very rough, as it depends on many factors, including the formation rates of black holes, the life cycle of stars, and the evolution of galaxies.
But it is nonsensical for another reason: life is not the most abundant manifestation of the laws of physics in the Universe; that honour goes more deservedly to black holes, of which there are estimated in the observable Universe - far more than there are living organisms - and black holes don't require special conditions in which to exist, other than a Universe with enough mass.
And black holes, far from showing that the Universe is a place designed to be friendly to life (which only the most parochial and naive simpletons could imagine, given that most of it above a few thousand feet of the surface of Earth is hostile to most forms of life and only a fraction of the surface is hospitable without special adaption or complex technology), are about the most destructive thing in the Universe, reducing everything that comes within their event horizon to energy which can only escape in the form of Hawking radiation.
So, if anything, the Universe appears to be 'fine-tuned' for self-destruction and the eventual extermination of life. Not exactly what the creation cults want their dupes to believe.
This theory has the advantage of a possible explanation for the appearance of design just as living organisms have, in the form of the Theory of Evolution. Black holes are believed to contain the quantum conditions for universes to spontaneously arise, so, if there were a mechanism for passing information through a black hole from the parent universe to a descendant one, natural selection should mean universes get better at making black holes.
How black holes swallow up entire suns, compete with any orbiting planets is the subject of a recent paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters which show computer generated simulations of the event. One notable observation if the 'spaghettification' effect where, from the point of view of a distant observer, an object falling into a black hole becomes drawn out into a thin string, like toothpaste out of a tube. This is caused by the dilation of space and time due to the increasing gravity as the black hole is approached and is an effect of General Relativity.
One of the authors of this paper, Professor Daniel Price of Monash University, Australia, has published an article about the team's findings in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Watch a star get destroyed by a supermassive black hole in the first simulation of its kind
Giant black holes in the centres of galaxies like our own Milky Way are known to occasionally munch on nearby stars.
This leads to a dramatic and complex process as the star plunging towards the supermassive black hole is spaghettified and torn to shreds. The resulting fireworks are known as a tidal disruption event.
In a new study published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, we have produced the most detailed simulations to date of how this process evolves over the span of a year.
A black hole tearing apart a sun
American astronomer Jack G. Hills and British astronomer Martin Rees first theorised about tidal disruption events in the 1970s and 80s. Rees’s theory predicted that half of the debris from the star would remain bound to the black hole, colliding with itself to form a hot, luminous swirl of matter known as an accretion disc. The disc would be so hot, it should radiate a copious amount of X-rays.
An artist’s impression of a moderately warm star – not at all what a black hole with a hot accretion disc would be like.
But to everyone’s surprise, most of the more than 100 candidate tidal disruption events discovered to date have been found to glow mainly at visible wavelengths, not X-rays. The observed temperatures in the debris are a mere 10,000 degrees Celsius. That’s like the surface of a moderately warm star, not the millions of degrees expected from hot gas around a supermassive black hole.
Even weirder is the inferred size of the glowing material around the black hole: several times larger than our Solar System and expanding rapidly away from the black hole at a few percent of the speed of light.
Given that even a million-solar-mass black hole is just a bit bigger than our Sun, the huge size of the glowing ball of material inferred from observations was a total surprise.
While astrophysicists have speculated the black hole must be somehow smothered by material during the disruption to explain the lack of X-ray emissions, to date nobody had been able to show how this actually occurs. This is where our simulations come in.
A slurp and a burp
Black holes are messy eaters – not unlike a five-year-old with a bowl of spaghetti. A star starts out as a compact body but gets spaghettified: stretched to a long, thin strand by the extreme tides of the black hole.
As half of the matter from the now-shredded star gets slurped towards the black hole, only 1% of it is actually swallowed. The rest ends up being blown away from the black hole in a sort of cosmic “burp”.
Simulating tidal disruption events with a computer is hard. Newton’s laws of gravity don’t work near a supermassive black hole, so one has to include all the weird and wonderful effects from Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
But hard work is what PhD students are for. Our recent graduate, David Liptai, developed a new do-it-Einstein’s-way simulation method which enabled the team to experiment by throwing unsuspecting stars in the general direction of the nearest black hole. You can even do it yourself.
Spaghettification in action, a close up of the half of the star that returns to the black hole.
The resultant simulations, seen in the videos here, are the first to show tidal disruption events all the way from the slurp to the burp.
They follow the spaghettification of the star through to when the debris falls back on the black hole, then a close approach that turns the stream into something like a wriggling garden hose. The simulation lasts for more than a year after the initial plunge.
Zoomed-out view, showing the debris from a star that mostly doesn’t go down the black hole and instead gets blown away in an expanding outflow.
What did we discover?
To our great surprise, we found that the 1% of material that does drop to the black hole generates so much heat, it powers an extremely powerful and nearly spherical outflow. (A bit like that time you ate too much curry, and for much the same reason.)
When observed like they would be by our telescopes, the simulations explain a lot. Turns out previous researchers were right about the smothering. It looks like this:
The same spaghettification as seen in the other movies, but as would be seen with an optical telescope [if we had a good-enough one]. It looks like a boiling bubble. We’ve called it the “Eddington envelope”.
The new simulations reveal why tidal disruption events really do look like a solar-system-sized star expanding at a few percent of the speed of light, powered by a black hole inside. In fact, one could even call it a “black hole sun”.
Daniel Price, Professor of Astrophysics, Monash University
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
For the technically-minded, more detail is given in the paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters:
Any creationists wishing to refute this paper will need to refute the details given here:
Abstract
Stars falling too close to massive black holes in the centres of galaxies can be torn apart by the strong tidal forces. Simulating the subsequent feeding of the black hole with disrupted material has proved challenging because of the range of timescales involved. Here we report a set of simulations that capture the relativistic disruption of the star, followed by one year of evolution of the returning debris stream. These reveal the formation of an expanding asymmetric bubble of material extending to hundreds of astronomical units — an outflowing Eddington envelope with an optically thick inner region. Such outflows have been hypothesised as the reprocessing layer needed to explain optical/UV emission in tidal disruption events, but never produced self-consistently in a simulation. Our model broadly matches the observed light curves with low temperatures, faint luminosities, and line widths of .
1 Introduction
In the classical picture of tidal disruption events (TDEs), the debris from the tidal disruption of a star on a parabolic orbit by a supermassive black hole (SMBH) rapidly circularises to form an accretion disc via relativistic apsidal precession (Rees, 1988). The predicted mass return rate of debris (Phinney, 1989) is and the light curve is assumed to be powered by accretion and to follow the same decay.
This picture alone does not predict several properties of observed TDEs, mainly related to their puzzling optical emission (van Velzen et al., 2011; van Velzen, 2018; van Velzen et al., 2021). These properties include: i) low peak bolometric luminosities (Chornock et al., 2014) of 1 per cent of the value expected from radiatively efficient accretion (Svirski et al., 2017); ii) low temperatures, more consistent with the photosphere of a B-type star than with that of an accretion disc at a few tens of gravitational radii () (Gezari et al., 2012; Miller, 2015), and consequently large emission radii, au for a black hole (Guillochon et al., 2014; Metzger & Stone, 2016); and iii) spectral line widths implying gas velocities of , much lower than expected from an accretion disc (Arcavi et al., 2014; Leloudas et al., 2019; Nicholl et al., 2019).
As a consequence, numerous authors have proposed alternative mechanisms for powering the TDE lightcurve, via either shocks from tidal stream collisions during disc formation (Lodato, 2012; Piran et al., 2015; Svirski et al., 2017; Ryu et al., 2023; Huang et al., 2023), or the reprocessing of photons through large scale optically thick layers, referred to as Eddington envelopes (Loeb & Ulmer, 1997), super-Eddington outflows (Strubbe & Quataert, 2009), quasi-static or cooling TDE envelopes (Roth et al., 2016; Coughlin & Begelman, 2014; Metzger, 2022) or mass-loaded outflows (Jiang et al., 2016; Metzger & Stone, 2016). Recent spectro-polarimetric observations suggest reprocessing in an outflowing, quasi-spherical envelope (Patra et al., 2022).
The wider problem is that few calculations exist that follow the debris from disruption to fallback for a parabolic orbit with the correct mass ratio. The challenge is to evolve a main-sequence star on a parabolic orbit around a SMBH from disruption and to follow the subsequent accretion of material (Metzger & Stone, 2016). The dynamic range involved when a star on a parabolic orbit is tidally disrupted by a SMBH is greater than four orders of magnitude: the tidal disruption radius is 50 times the gravitational radius, where general relativistic effects are important, while the apoapsis of even the most bound material is another factor of 200 further away. This challenge led previous studies to consider a variety of simplifications (Stone et al., 2019): i) reducing the mass ratio between the star and the black hole by considering intermediate mass black holes (Ramirez-Ruiz & Rosswog, 2009; Guillochon et al., 2014); ii) using a Newtonian gravitational potential (Evans & Kochanek, 1989; Rosswog et al., 2008; Lodato et al., 2009; Guillochon et al., 2009; Golightly et al., 2019), pseudo-Newtonian (Hayasaki et al., 2013; Bonnerot et al., 2016) or post-Newtonian approximations (Ayal et al., 2000; Hayasaki et al., 2016); iii) simulating only the first passage of the star (Evans & Kochanek, 1989; Laguna et al., 1993; Khokhlov et al., 1993; Frolov et al., 1994; Diener et al., 1997; Kobayashi et al., 2004; Guillochon et al., 2009; Guillochon & Ramirez-Ruiz, 2013; Tejeda et al., 2017; Gafton & Rosswog, 2019; Goicovic et al., 2019); and iv) assuming stars initially on bound, highly eccentric orbits instead of parabolic orbits (Sadowski et al., 2016; Hayasaki et al., 2013, 2016; Bonnerot et al., 2016; Liptai et al., 2019; Hu et al., 2024).
These studies have, nevertheless, provided useful insights into the details of the tidal disruption process. In particular, it has been shown that the distribution of orbital energies of the debris following the initial disruption is roughly consistent with = const, consistent with the analytic prediction of a mass fallback rate, although the details can depend on many factors such as stellar spin, stellar composition, penetration factor and black hole spin (Lodato et al., 2009; Kesden, 2012; Guillochon & Ramirez-Ruiz, 2013; Golightly et al., 2019; Sacchi & Lodato, 2019). The importance of general relativistic effects in circularising debris has also been demonstrated. The self-intersection of the debris stream, which efficiently dissipates large amounts of orbital energy, is made possible by relativistic apsidal precession (Hayasaki et al., 2016; Bonnerot et al., 2016; Liptai et al., 2019; Calderón et al., 2024). But until recently debris circularisation has only been shown for stars on bound orbits, with correspondingly small apoapsis distances and often deep penetration factors (we define the penetration factor as , where is the tidal radius and is the pericenter distance).
Recent works have shown that circularisation and initiation of accretion is possible in the parabolic case, by a combination of energy dissipation in the ‘nozzle shock’ that occurs on second pericenter passage (Steinberg & Stone 2024; but see Bonnerot & Lu 2022 and Appendix E for convergence studies of the nozzle shock) and/or relativistic precession leading to stream collisions (Andalman et al., 2022).
In this paper, we present a set of simulations that self-consistently evolve a one solar mass polytropic star on a parabolic orbit around a solar mass black hole from the star’s disruption to circularization of the returning debris and then accretion. We follow the debris evolution for one year post-disruption, enabling us to approximately compute synthetic light curves which appear to match the key features of observations.
Figure 1:One year in the life of a tidal disruption event. We show shapshots of column density in the simulation of a star on a parabolic orbit with , disrupted by a black hole, using SPH particles in the Schwarzschild metric. Main panel shows the large scale outflows after 365 days projected in the plane with log scale. Inset panels show the stream evolution on small scales ( au), showing snapshots of column density projected in the plane on a linear scale from (colours are allowed to saturate). Animated versions of this figure are available in the online article. Data and scripts used to create the figure are available on Zenodo:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11438154 (catalog doi:10.5281/zenodo.11438154)
The Universe is far from the ideal environment for life to thrive in - known life only exists as an encrustation on or near the surface of a single planet. Instead, it is a violent and unstable chaos of competing forces with an estimated supper-dense, massive black holes, which far exceeds the number of life forms in the known Universe, drawing to inevitable annihilation any body that strays too close.
It requires parochial ignorance of the first order to imagine that the entire Universe is designed for life. It is far easier to make a case for it being designed for black holes, although that, as with the 'designed for life' case, case would require a priori evidence of the existence of a creative entity in the form of an explanation of its origins and definitive evidence of it ever being recorded as creating anything. And by recorded, I don't mean written in the mythology of Bronze Age pastoralists who thought the Universe was a small flat place with a dome over it and containing nothing that was unknown within a day or two's walk of the Canaanite Hills where they grazed their goats, and later decreed to be literal history by people with a vested interest in people believing the myths.
Advertisement
What Makes You So Special? From The Big Bang To You
How did you come to be here, now? This books takes you from the Big Bang to the evolution of modern humans and the history of human cultures, showing that science is an adventure of discovery and a source of limitless wonder, giving us richer and more rewarding appreciation of the phenomenal privilege of merely being alive and able to begin to understand it all.
Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle
Advertisement
Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It
This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.
Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle
Figure 1. Left: Plan of Enclosures A–D at Göbekli Tepe. Right: Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe, Enclosure D.
Image courtesy of Alistair Coombs.
One of the more obvious blunders in the opening verses of the Bible is the use of the term 'day', supposedly before the sun was created. But the measure of time called 'a day' is the rotation period of Earth, as it orbits the sun.
Why would a god choose that measure of time, of all the planets and suns in the Universe, and before it had allegedly created either the sun or Earth? Or more specifically, why would the people who made up the creation myth assume it would when the stories they made up and the Universe they described have no concept of a rotating Earth or of Earth orbiting the sun, which they described as fixed to a dome over a flat, 'fixed, immobile' Earth?
Of course, the answer is that the story tellers had inherited their concept of time and how the passage of time could be measured over the course of 365 days and be found to follow a repeating pattern, and simply assumed any god would use the measure they were familiar with - they were imbuing their god with human characteristics.
One of those cultural ancestors live not a million miles from where the Bronze Age Canaanite Pastoralists who made up the origin myths later incorporated in a book decreed to be holy, but they predated them by many millennia.
Todays' refutation of creationism comes to us from the field of astronomy and in particular the details of what happened and is still happening in the expanding supernova remnant known as Cassiopeia A which has a super-dense body at its centre, probably a neutron star, the collapsed remains of the parent star.
A neutron star is the remains of an old star that was too large to collapse to a white dwarf but not large enough to become a black hole. In a neutron star, the pressure due to gravity is so intense that even atoms compress, and electrons are forced into protons to become neutrons, so the star becomes nothing but neutrons. Due to conservation of angular momentum a neutron star has a rotation rate in seconds or less.
Cassiopeia A (Cas A) was observed in the night sky 350 years ago. It is 11,000 light years away, so the light the explosion generated reached Earth 11,000 years after the explosion, which simple maths tells us happened 1,350 years before creationists think the Universe was created. It was of course an event in that long, 13.8 billion years pre-'Creation' history of the Universe when 99.99999% of its history, and 99.9975% of the history of Earth occurred.
A supernova like Cas A is the birthplace of star dust out of which Earth and everything on it is made. It is the stuff that connects us to the rest of the universe and to which we, or rather the atoms and molecules that we are made of, will return to be recycled into future planets around future suns, when our own sun swallows up the inner planets then goes supernova itself, and flings our atoms out into the cosmos to be recycled as new suns and planetary systems, maybe to be studied by cosmologists on some other planet wondering about that sudden flash of light in the Milky Way, that was the death of our sun.
Stars died and because they died, you live. You are made by stars out of stardust and in a very real sense; because you are made of the same stuff the Universe is made of and are a part of it, there is something even more wonderful about you. Through you, though not just through you, and maybe not just here on this small planet, the Universe has gained self–awareness and can begin to understand itself.
Through you it can stand on the surface of this beautiful little jewel in the cosmos, can look up in awe at itself and think "Wow!"
In the Hubble version of the model (left), the pillars feature dark brown, opaque dust and bright yellow ionized gas set against a greenish-blue background. The Webb version (right) showcases orange and orange-brown dust that is semi-transparent, with light blue ionized gas against a dark blue background.
Greg Bacon, Ralf Crawford, Joseph DePasquale, Leah Hustak, Christian Nieves, Joseph Olmsted, Alyssa Pagan, and Frank Summers (STScI), NASA's Universe of Learning
The child-like naïvety of those who made up the origin myths in the Bible was brought into sharper focus today with the publication of images of the 'Pillars of Creation' in the heart of the Eagle Nebula.
This fragment of the known universe was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 and opened many people's eyes to the grandeur and size of the Universe compared to the Bible's laughably naïve description of it as a small, flat planet with a dome over it to keep the water about the sky out.
Now this image has been brought into even sharper focus by the James Webb Space Telescope with a new 3D rendering and a movie so viers can experience flying between the birthplace of stars.
The JADES Deep Field uses observations taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) program. A team of astronomers studying JADES data identified about 80 objects (circled in green) that changed in brightness over time. Most of these objects, known as transients, are the result of exploding stars or supernovae. Prior to this survey, only a handful of supernovae had been found above a redshift of 2, which corresponds to when the universe was only 3.3 billion years old — just 25% of its current age. The JADES sample contains many supernovae that exploded even further in the past, when the universe was less than 2 billion years old. It includes the farthest one ever spectroscopically confirmed, at a redshift of 3.6. Its progenitor star exploded when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to allow scientists to witness events almost at the beginning of time - at least when the Universe was just 1.8 billion years old. This comes in the form of supernovae or exploding stars, the light from which has just reached the JWST's detectors, having taken some 12 billion years to get there.
How long does it take light to travel 2 meters?
To determine how long it takes light to travel 2 meters, you can use the speed of light in a vacuum, which is approximately meters per second.
The formula to calculate the time it takes for light to travel a certain distance is:
Plugging in the values:
Let's calculate this:
So, it takes approximately 6.67 nanoseconds for light to travel 2 meters.
I have previously explained how witnessing an event, the information about which has taken billions of years to arrive is no less witnessing that event than witnessing an event in the same room, information about which took a few nanoseconds to reach us.
And what the cosmologists have seen is far more supernovae than was previously thought.
The recent press release from NASA explains how these events were seen:
‘A Supernova Discovery Machine’
To make these discoveries, the team analyzed imaging data obtained as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program. Webb is ideal for finding extremely distant supernovae because their light is stretched into longer wavelengths — a phenomenon known as cosmological redshift.
Prior to Webb’s launch, only a handful of supernovae had been found above a redshift of 2, which corresponds to when the universe was only 3.3 billion years old — just 25% of its current age. The JADES sample contains many supernovae that exploded even further in the past, when the universe was less than 2 billion years old.
Previously, researchers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to view supernovae from when the universe was in the "young adult" stage. With JADES, scientists are seeing supernovae when the universe was in its “teens” or “pre-teens.” In the future, they hope to look back to the “toddler” or “infant” phase of the universe.
To discover the supernovae, the team compared multiple images taken up to one year apart and looked for sources that disappeared or appeared in those images. These objects that vary in observed brightness over time are called transients, and supernovae are a type of transient. In all, the JADES Transient Survey Sample team uncovered about 80 supernovae in a patch of sky only about the thickness of a grain of rice held at arm’s length. [my highlight]
.jpg)
