Creationism in Crisis - The James Webb Space Telescope Reveals an Ancient Universe

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Webb Reveals New Structures Within Iconic Supernova | NASA

The age of the universe is guaranteed to get creationists tying themselves in knots while performing the most contorted mental gymnastics ad foaming at the mouth. Their problem is that they have been conditioned to dismiss scientific dating by chanting mindlessly about all radiometric dating methods being wrong because radioactive decay rates changed over time and dating the same sample by different methods gives different results.

The latter point, to a creationist, is the clincher because, to a simplistic, black vs white, thinker any discrepancy means the entire process is wrong and therefore its rational to argue that they can make 8,000 years look like several billion years.

But their problem is, dating the age of celestial objects such as the Ring Nebula does not rely on radiometric dating. Astronomers use a variety of methods to calculate the distance of the object from Earth, or in this case the JWST:

Creationism in Crisis - A 4.5 Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Helping to Understand How The Solar System Formed

Erg Chech 002 meteorite slice (backlit)

Flickr/Steve Jurvetson

Erg Chech 002 (EC 002) Meteorite

Credit: Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Sahara space rock 4.5 billion years old upends assumptions about the early Solar System

According to creationists, a magic supernatural god magicked a flat Earth into existence from nothing and put a dome over it to keep the water about the sky out. It then hung a sun and a moon from the dome and the sun has been orbiting Earth ever since. In its Bronze Age account of this creation, the magic god 'forgot' to say where the sun went at night, and creationists have puzzled over that problem for centuries, never reaching a conclusion.

Nowadays, 25% of Americans still believe Earth is the centre of the universe and the sun orbits it, although most of them now accept that Earth is no longer flat or has a dome over it, whilst believing the Bible, which says otherwise, is the inerrant word of the god who created everything from nothing.

Science, on the other hand, is providing evidence that the universe is some 14 billion years and the solar system, with the sun at the centre and Earth orbiting it, formed some 4.5 billion years ago.

One of the pieces of evidence is a meteorite, recovered from a sand dune in the Saharah Desert which has been dated to 4.5 billion years old, using the aluminium-26 – magnesium-26 (26Al-26Mg) decay system combined with the Uranium/Lead system.

First, a little AI information from ChatGPT3.5 about the dating methods used, their accuracy and limitations. Creationists especially might want to skip this since it refutes many of their claims about radiometric dating in general, and shows their responses to be parrot squawks, regurgitated on cue without the slightest understanding of the subject:

Creationism in Crisis - Cosmologists May Have the Age of the Universe Wrong - But not in the Way Creationisst Might Like To Imagine

Spiral Galaxy NGC 1672 from Hubble

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA);

Reinventing cosmology: uOttawa research puts age of universe at 26.7 — not 13.7 — billion years | About us

Scientists may be wrong about the age of the Universe!

But there is no reason for creationists to get excited thinking their childish superstition might have some scientific merit after all.

A researcher from the University of Ottawa, believes he has shown the Universe is not the 8,000 years old that creationists dogma dictates they believe; it's not even the 13.7 Billion years old that mainstream cosmologists believe. In fact, it might be 27.7 billion years old!

The new thinking is the work of Rajendra Gupta, adjunct professor of physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa. He has attempted to resolve some problems with the existing model, the Lambda-CDM concordance model, which estimates the Universe to be 13.797 billion years old. This model fails to explain why some stars like the Methuselah appear to be older than the estimated age of our universe and early galaxies in an advanced state of evolution, as discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope. These galaxies, existing a mere 300 million years or so after the Big Bang is calculated to have occurred, appear to have a level of maturity and mass typically associated with billions of years of cosmic evolution. Furthermore, they’re surprisingly small in size, adding another layer of mystery to the equation.

Professor Gupta's new theory in part resurrects a 1922 theory proposed to explain Hubble's red shift within the idea of a steady state Universe, known as "Zwicky's tired light theory":

Zwicky's tired light theory

Zwicky's tired light theory, proposed by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1920s, suggests an alternative explanation for the redshift observed in the light coming from distant astronomical objects.

According to the tired light theory, the redshift observed in the light from distant objects is not due to the Doppler effect caused by the expansion of the universe, as described by the prevailing Big Bang theory. Instead, Zwicky proposed that light loses energy as it travels through space over vast distances, resulting in a gradual decrease in its frequency (and hence, an increase in its wavelength) and a corresponding shift towards the red end of the spectrum.

In the tired light theory, the loss of energy by photons is caused by interactions with other particles or fields in space. As photons travel through space, they continually collide with these hypothetical particles or fields, which gradually sap their energy and cause the redshift. This energy loss mechanism is often referred to as "tiredness" of the light.

However, it's important to note that Zwicky's tired light theory has not gained wide acceptance among scientists. The prevailing consensus among astrophysicists and cosmologists is that the observed redshift is primarily a result of the expansion of the universe, as explained by the Big Bang theory, rather than the tired light hypothesis. The tired light theory faces several challenges in providing a comprehensive explanation for the observed redshift and other cosmological phenomena.

ChatGPT3 "What is Zwicky’s tired light theory?" [Response to user question] Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/

Zwicky's tired light theory has been ruled out by the modern consensus for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the difference in observation of light intensity from distant objects as predicted by the steady state and the expanding Universe models:

>For example, in a static universe with tired light mechanisms, the surface brightness of stars and galaxies should be constant, that is, the farther an object is, the less light we receive, but its apparent area diminishes as well, so the light received divided by the apparent area should be constant. In an expanding universe, the surface brightness diminishes with distance. As the observed object recedes, photons are emitted at a reduced rate because each photon has to travel a distance that is a little longer than the previous one, while its energy is reduced a little because of increasing redshift at a larger distance. On the other hand, in an expanding universe, the object appears to be larger than it really is, because it was closer to us when the photons started their travel. This causes a difference in surface brilliance of objects between a static and an expanding Universe. This is known as the Tolman surface brightness test that in those studies favors the expanding universe hypothesis and rules out static tired light model.

Wikipedia

Professor Gupta has proposed a form of Zwicky’s tired light theory and an idea proposed by Paul Dirac - "coupling Constants". The idea is that these constants govern the interaction between particles but they could have 'evolved' over time. By allowing these coupled constants to evolve over time, Gupta has moved the age of the Universe back several billion years to a time which accounts for the apparently mature small galaxies seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. It also allows the 'cosmological constant', introduced to explain the expansion of the universe due to dark energy to be replaces by Dirac's 'Coupled Constants'.

His work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS):

Abstract

Deep space observations of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed that the structure and masses of very early Universe galaxies at high redshifts (z∼15 ⁠), existing at ∼ 0.3 Gyr after the BigBang, may be as evolved as the galaxies in existence for ∼10 Gyr. The JWST findings are thus in strong tension with the ΛCDM cosmological model. While tired light (TL) models have been shown to comply with the JWST angular galaxy size data, they cannot satisfactorily explain isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations or fit the supernovae distance modulus vs. redshift data well. We have developed hybrid models that include the tired light concept in the expanding universe. The hybrid ΛCDM model fits the supernovae type 1a data well but not the JWST observations. We present a model with covarying coupling constants (CCC), starting from the modified FLRW metric and resulting Einstein and Friedmann equations, and a CCC + TL hybrid model. They fit the Pantheon + data admirably, and the CCC + TL model is compliant with the JWST observations. It stretches the age of the universe to 26.7 Gyr with 5.8 Gyr at z=10 and 3.5 Gyr at z=20⁠, giving enough time to form massive galaxies. It thus resolves the ‘impossible early galaxy’ problem without requiring the existence of primordial black hole seeds or modified power spectrum, rapid formation of massive population III stars, and super Eddington accretion rates. One could infer the CCC model as an extension of the ΛCDM model with a dynamic cosmological constant

R Gupta
JWST early Universe observations and ΛCDM cosmology,
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2023;, stad2032, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad2032

© 2023 Oxford University Press / The Royal Astronomical Society.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

So, whether you go with Zwicky's tired light theory, Paul Dirac’s 'Coupled Constants', Hubble and Lemaître's Big Bang, or Professor Gupta's combination of these ideas, it's still impossible to come up with an age anywhere near what the creationists superstition says is the age of the Universe, and the current debate amongst cosmologists is moving the age even further away from the Biblical account.

But then when did having demonstrably counter-factual belief ever trouble a troobuleeving creationist?

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe is Larger and More Majestic Than the Ignorant Authors of Genesis Ever Imagined - Don't Blame Them, They Were Only Doing Their Best With What Little Knowledge They Had

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Seven Amazing Accomplishments the James Webb Telescope Achieved in Its First Year | Science | Smithsonian Magazine

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Creationism in Crisis - Key Ingredient for Abiogenesis Found on Jupiter's Moon, Enceladus

Creationism in Crisis

Key Ingredient for Abiogenesis Found on Jupiter's Moon, Enceladus

Enceladus has the whitest and most reflective surface that astronomers have yet observed, and it’s known for spraying out tiny icy silica particles.

Source: UCLA

Key building block for life found at Saturn’s Moon Enceladus | Southwest Research Institute

Artist's impression of the south polar region of Enceladus shows massive jets of water ice being blasted into space.

Image credit: Karl Kofoed / NASA.

Creationist frauds playing the 'Big Scary Numbers' tactic and the false dichotomy fallacy, which argues that the probability of self-replicating molecules arising on Earth is so small as to be indistinguishable from zero, and therefore it must have been done by the locally-popular god their mummy and daddy believed in, usually include the notional idea of the 'Goldilocks zone' which is assumed to be a zone round the sun where the conditions are 'just right' for life to exist.

They then argue that the Universe must be fine-tuned for human life on Earth, therefore God did it!

This is, of course, a statistical sleight of hand because the probability of something happening that has already happened is 1 (certainty), not some infinitesimally small fraction of 1. It has happened, therefore it happened. For some reason, the logic in that escapes the hard of thinking on whom the creationist frauds prey.

So, anything which shows that self-replicating molecules, i.e., life arising elsewhere in the Universe, and especially in the solar system far away from the 'Goldilocks zone', is anathema for creationists who must find a way to deal with another inconvenient fact.

Nevertheless, this is exactly what happened recently when an international team of scientists led by Frank Postberg, of the Institut für Geologische Wissenschaften, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, and including Christopher R. Glein of the Space Science Division, Space Sector, Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX, USA have shown that the ocean beneath the ice covering on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has a key building block for 'life', phosphate. Phosphates are essential for life as we know it, not only as the main mineral in the bones of vertebrates but also as a component of metabolic pathways in the form of adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and the nucleotides in DNA and RNA.
The discovery was made in data from NASA’s Cassini mission.

A Southwest Research Institute press release explain how this was done:

Creationism in Crisis - Stuff The Bible's Scientifically illiterate Authors Never Imagined

Creationism in Crisis

Stuff The Bible's Scientifically illiterate Authors Never Imagined

Figure 1: Illustration of gravitational lensing by a galaxy. Light from a more distant and reddish galaxy is bent by a more nearby and bluish galaxy, which acts like a natural cosmic telescope to magnify the more distant galaxy. In this instance, multiple images of the reddish galaxy are created, forming a reddish ring-like feature referred to as an Einstein ring around the bluish galaxy.

Image credit: ALMA, L Calcada, Y. Hezaveh et al.

Howe the authors of Genesis saw the Universe

HKU Astrophysicists Reveal the Nature of Dark Matter through the Study of Crinkles in Spacetime - All News - Media - HKU

Back in the bronze Age, in the days that Christopher Hitchens described as 'the fearful infancy of our species', before we had even invented the wheel and isolated tribes still thought Earth was flat, the best explanation they could think of for where everything came from was the result of some magic spells cast by an invisible magician who lived above the sky. Agency in all things and magic, were assumed to be behind everything, just as they are today by creationists.

So, imagine these ignorant hill farmers, who thought stars were hanging from a dome over a flat Earth, struggling to come to terms with concepts such as deep space where celestial bodies are millions of light years apart and most of it is composed of invisible matter?

Magic and agency in all things
(Bible moralisée, French, 13th century)

How on Earth were these simple, ignorant people going to guess at an accurate description of the cosmos and its origins?

They weren’t of course. The best they could do was to describe a world which ran on magic and give magical explanations for everything they didn't understand, confident that those who were going to read their guesses were equally ignorant.

Contrast that situation about 3000 years ago with today's astrophysicist trying to make sense of what can be observed.

Having abandoned magic and supernatural agency as an explanation for anything, about 200 years ago, modern scientists have to rely on what can be observed, either directly or indirectly, and one of their observations is that the Universe has far more mass in it than can be accounted for by observation of that which can be seen. In other words, the observable universe has a lot of stuff that can't be seen but which is giving it mass.

How then do we know about it? Because we now understand the relationship between mass and gravity, so we can observe dark matter indirectly by observing the effect its gravity has on things we can see, such as galaxies.

You wouldn't expect the simple-minded hill farmers who wrote Genesis to have any inkling that such substance even existed, let alone come up with an explanation of what this 'dark matter' is, other than the product of magic words, of course.

This is why there is no mention, not even the tiniest hint, of dark matter in the Bible, or even that the universe is as massive as it is. In the ignorant minds of the authors, 'stars' (whether galaxies or suns) were points of light stuck on the underside of the dome that kept the water above the sky out. Of course, you wouldn't expect scientifically illiterate and ignorant people to describe and explain the origins of dark matter, but you WOULD expect any creator god who filled the Universe with dark matter to be able to describe and explain it.

How Science Works - Looking For Evidence That the Current Consensus May be Wrong or Incomplete

How Science Works

Looking For Evidence That the Current Consensus May be Wrong or Incomplete

The small red dot highlighted inside the white box on this James Webb Space Telescope image is an early galaxy, seen as it looked just 350 million years after the Big Bang.

James Webb Space Telescope Images Challenge Theories of How Universe Evolved | College of Natural Sciences

Science is reasonable uncertainty
Religion is unreasonable certainty.

Images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-800 million years after the Big Bang.
These are more massive that the theory predicts.

Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/I. Labbe

The great strength of science is scientists' willingness to re-examine what they think they know and to change their mind when the evidence changes. Science values truth over certainty, so all scientific knowledge is provisional and contingent on not being falsified.

Religion, by contrast, sells certainty and theists value certainty over truth, more so at the fundamentalist extreme, where intellectual dishonesty and sleights of hand to gain followers are rewarded and admired (as the many extremely wealthy televangelists in the USA, to whom lying is second nature, attest). Intellectually bankrupt creationists prefer a comforting lie to an uncomfortable truth. Scientists, on the other hand, can make their name and gain kudos and scientific respect by successfully challenging the consensus view with convincing evidence and exposed frauds are cast into academic oblivion.

To see this in action, try to get a creationist to accept that a glaring contradiction in the Bible means that one or other verse must be wrong because both mutually exclusive contradictory statements can't both be right.

For example, the contradictory accounts of what Judas did with the 30 pieces of silver, how he died, who bought the 'field of blood' and why was it so-called?

Creationism in Crisis - Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

Creationism in Crisis

Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

A view of Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies from the James Webb Telescope.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Creationism in Crisis

Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope

New map of the universe’s cosmic growth supports Einstein’s theory of gravity

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), Chile

It has been said that, like the Qur'an, if the Bible were discovered for the first time today, we could date it accurately by the scientific ignorance in it.

There is no hint of knowledge about Germ Theory, electricity, atoms, photosynthesis, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, gravity, or dark matter and dark energy, anywhere in the Bible, unless you stretch the meanings of words beyond breaking point and add things that are not there.

It's as though the authors knew no more than the little that was already known at the time and didn't realise that much of what they thought they knew was fundamentally wrong. But you would expect a creator god who wanted us to believe it knew everything and most importantly, had a vital message for mankind, would have included something new and even something useful - like electricity or antibiotics, for example, but it couldn't even describe the scientific method, let alone a null hypothesis or the need for controls in an experiment.

So, it took until the early part of the 20th century for a scientist to discover that matter and energy are interchangeable because they are different aspects of the same thing, and so why planets orbit suns and Earth has enough gravity to stop us and the atmosphere floating off into space. Einstein’s discovery of Relativity is now a fundamental of cosmology and theoretical astrophysics.

Creation News - Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Hubble Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars | NASA

Artist's impression of a runaway supermassive black hole that was ejected from its host galaxy as a result of a tussle between it and two other black holes. As the black hole plows through intergalactic space it compresses tenuous gas in front of it. This precipitates the birth of hot blue stars. This illustration is based on Hubble Space Telescope observations of a 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of stars behind an escaping black hole.

Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)

The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed a runway supermassive blackhole, with a mass about that of 20 million of our suns, which is moving through space and leaving a trail of newly created suns in a wake about 200,000-light-years long (twice the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy). The object is travelling so fast it covers the equivalent of the distance from Earth to the moon in 14 minutes.

Hubble image of black, deep-space field with white, yellow, and reddish galaxies. Image center: small, white-bordered, boxed area that contains one, long, thin, diagonal streak of whitish-blue stars. Two galaxies also reside within the box.

This Hubble Space Telescope archival photo captures a curious linear feature that is so unusual it was first dismissed as an imaging artifact from Hubble's cameras. But follow-up spectroscopic observations reveal it is a 200,000-light-year-long chain of young blue stars. A supermassive black hole lies at the tip of the bridge at lower left. The black hole was ejected from the galaxy at upper right. It compressed gas in its wake to leave a long trail of young blue stars. Nothing like this has ever been seen before in the universe. This unusual event happened when the universe was approximately half its current age.

NASA, ESA, Pieter van Dokkum (Yale); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Close up of the area inside the white sqyare above.

It is believed that, by compressing the thin interstellar gas ahead of it, this initiates a gravitational collapse to condense into suns. The time taken for this process puts the black hole far enough away to avoid swallowing the nascent suns, so leaving the trail of young sons behind it.

We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole. What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole.

Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known.

This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it. I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, 'oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.' When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before.

Pieter van Dokkum
Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to.

The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole.

Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole.

Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy. The original binary may have remained intact, or the new interloper black hole may have replaced one of the two that were in the original binary, and kicked out the previous companion.

When the single black hole took off in one direction, the binary black holes shot off in the opposite direction. There is a feature seen on the opposite side of the host galaxy that might be the runaway binary black hole. Circumstantial evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy’s core. The next step is to do follow-up observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by The American Astronomical Society. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

The research paper was published yesterday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Abstract

The interaction of a runaway supermassive black hole (SMBH) with the circumgalactic medium (CGM) can lead to the formation of a wake of shocked gas and young stars behind it. Here we report the serendipitous discovery of an extremely narrow linear feature in Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys images that may be an example of such a wake. The feature extends 62 kpc from the nucleus of a compact star-forming galaxy at z = 0.964. Keck Low-resolution Imaging Spectrometer spectra show that the [O iii]/Hβ ratio varies from ∼1 to ∼10 along the feature, indicating a mixture of star formation and fast shocks. The feature terminates in a bright [O iii] knot with a luminosity of ≈1.9 × 1041 erg s⁻¹. The stellar continuum colors vary along the feature and are well fit by a simple model that has a monotonically increasing age with the distance from the tip. The line ratios, colors, and overall morphology are consistent with an ejected SMBH moving through the CGM at a high speed while triggering star formation. The best-fit time since ejection is ∼39 Myr, and the implied velocity is v BH ∼ 1600 km s⁻¹. The feature is not perfectly straight in the HST images, and we show that the amplitude of the observed spatial variations is consistent with the runaway SMBH interpretation. Opposite the primary wake is a fainter and shorter feature, marginally detected only in [O iii] and the rest-frame far-ultraviolet. This feature may be shocked gas behind a binary SMBH that was ejected at the same time as the SMBH that produced the primary wake.

van Dokkum, Pieter; Pasha, Imad; Buzzo, Maria Luisa; LaMassa, Stephanie; Shen, Zili; Keim, Michael A.; Abraham, Roberto; Conroy, Charlie; Danieli, Shany; Mitra, Kaustav; Nagai, Daisuke; Natarajan, Priyamvada; Romanowsky, Aaron J.; Tremblay, Grant; Urry, C. Megan; van den Bosch, Frank C.
A Candidate Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Identified by Shocks and Star Formation in its Wake
The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2023), 946(2). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/acba86.

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by The American Astronomical Society. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Compare that to the creationist notion that the formation of the universe is accurately described by a Bronze Age Hebrew origin myth that has a magic man made of nothing, spoke some magic words that cause the Universe to form out of nothing. More magic words then cause Earth's sun to form, several days after there was light, measured on a time basis based on the rotation period of a planet that didn't yet exist as it orbits a sun that hadn't been created, and which wasn't going to orbit it anyway as it would be fixed in space so it couldn’t move, while the sun orbits around it.

Creationists hold that this is the best available description of reality, far surpassing for accuracy and reliability anything that science can reveal. People who believe that also hold that their evidence-free superstition is a valid alternative to modern science and should be given equal status in any debate because Bronze Age Canaanite hill farmers who thought Earth was flat and hadn't yet invented the wheel, knew more than we do.

Order From Chaos in Space - Science Exlains it

An alien magastructure?
Surely there must be an intelligence behind such an ordered structure! Read on!

Left: false-colour JWST/MIRI Imager observations of WR 140 taken with the F770W, F1500W and F2100W filters that correspond to blue, green and red, respectively. Eight symmetric diffraction spikes are seen around the saturated core of WR 140 (at the origin) that exhibit bluer colours than the dust emission. Right: JWST/MIRI MRS spectral data cube images of WR 140 from Channel 2 at 8.01 μm taken at two different positions that cover the central binary and shell 1 (Offset 1, top) and shells 1 and 2 (Offset 2, bottom) shown in a square-root stretch. The central binary and bright dust emission features are labelled in the MRS data cube images.

Alien megastructures? Cosmic thumbprint? What's behind a James Webb telescope photo that had even astronomers stumped

One of the Creationist cult's articles of faith is the demonstrably false assertion that you can't get order from chaos, although how they imagine raindrops form, or even more subtly, how an internal combustion engine works without the operation of the gas laws which are emergent laws from the chaotic mass action of gas molecules, is anyone's guess.

A moment's thought should tell them that, with a directional force involved, there can be no such thing as true randomness in nature. One such force is of course gravity which turns a cloud of randomly distributed gas particles into an ordered sun and maybe a planetary system. Another example is the process of natural selection which gives a non-random progress towards assorted genes in a species from the random occurrence of genetic mutations.

And here is yet another example of structure emerging naturally from chaotic dust particles in an article from The Conversation by Professor Peter Tuthill, an Astrophysicist at the University of Sydney, NSW, Australia. The article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The force in this instance is the complex pattern of gravity generated by two stars in elliptical orbit around each other in a binary system and the intense solar winds each gives off which drives regular pulses of dust from their surfaces.

The original article can be read here:

Another Bible Blooper Exposed by Science.

One more clue to the Moon’s origin | ETH Zurich

There are several theories about the origin of the moon. The discovery of noble gases in lunar meteorites brings us one step closer to understanding its origin.

Image: Adobe Stock

Creationists and members of other Bible literalist cults regard the description of the formation of the cosmos and then Earth in the opening chapter of Genesis as the bast available description of reality, notwithstanding that it describes Earth as having a dome over it from which the creator god hung the moon as a lamp, so we would know it is night time.

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.

And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Genesis 1:16-19

The problem these cultists have is that science continually and consistently proves this, and much else in the Bible, wrong - which is embarrassing for words of the supposed creator of it. Sadly, for them, it can't even be passed off as an allegory or a metaphor - the usual excuse when the Bible describes something that isn't so - because there is nothing that can be represented as a firmament to which the sun and moon are fixed, and the moon can't even be represented as a lamp, since a lamp has its own light, and the moon doesn't. Nor is the moon only visible at night, so if its purpose really was to tell us when it is night time, the putative creator couldn't even get that right!

Stunning Success for Science as First Webb Telescope Images Released.

President Biden Reveals First Image from NASA’s Webb Telescope | NASA

Webb’s first deep field is galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, and it is teeming with thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared.

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

While fundamentalist religions based on Bronze Age superstitious ignorance still struggle to reconcile their beliefs with scientific realities, science has progressed to the point where we now can take photographs of deep space, revealing details of which the superstitious founders of religions would never have even dreamed.

The first images from NASA's newly commissioned Webb telescope were released yesterday by President Joe Biden. They show the teeming thousands of galaxies in the galaxy cluster, SMACS 0723. Each of these thousands of galaxies in this one cluster, like the Milky Way galaxy, will contain trillions of suns, many of which will have orbital planets similar to those in the Solar System. This image is even more astounding when you realise that the area of the sky it shows, as seen from Earth, would be covered by a single grain of sand, held at arm’s length!

How Science Works (And Why Religion Doesn't)

The Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31). The small Messier 32 galaxy is seen above and slightly to the left (directly south) of the centre of M31, and Messier 110 is below and to the left. Above and to the left of M32 is the star HD 3914. This is an RGB image + some h alpha data. Captured in the Israeli desert (the Negev). Equipment: Celestron Cpc1100 Millburn wedge Starizona hyperstar Zwo asi294mc for imaging + asi178mc for guiding Finderscope for guiding Acquisition: 60 subs of 32 seconds for RGB 20 subs of 64 seconds for hydrogen alpha (This is an f/2 config) Captured with sharpcap and guided with phd2 Processing: Stacked in pixinsight Processed and enhanced in photoshop including noise reduction, sharpening etc.

By ;David (Deddy) Dayag - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Too many disk galaxies than theory allows — University of Bonn

Science's greatest strength, and the thing that seems to baffle Creationists most, is the way it constantly reassesses and revises its theories and never holds any opinion as sacred and unchallengeable. Religions, by contrast, have fundamental tenets, almost literally cast in tablets of stone, which, if they are ever seriously questioned, leads to internal conflict, schisms and often open violent hostilities. To question the fundamental beliefs of a religion is tantamount to leaving that religion.

Here, for example, we have scientists examining a fundamental theory in cosmology and concluding, quite amicably and dispassionately, that the generally accepted Standard Model of Cosmology is fundamentally flawed. What will happen now is that others will try to replicate these findings, a debate will ensue and, if necessary former ideas that were held to be true will be abandoned and revised, and, in all probability if they are proved to be correct, the scientists who made the discovery will be rewarded with prizes and plaudits and top jobs in prestigious institutes.

I don't pretend to be an expert in this subject, but what the cosmologists from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany, St Andrews University, Scotland, UK and Charles University in the Czech Republic believe they have shown is that there is a significant discrepancy between the number of disk galaxies that can be observed and what the 'Standard Model' predicts, therefore the Standard Model is wrong and needs revising. And they are proposing a new one which would require a far-reaching revision of other areas of physics. And all because the accepted Standard Model of Cosmology does not appear to model the reality it was designed to explain.

The Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn news release accompnying the team's open access publication in The Astrophysical Journal, explains:

How Come no Religion Ever Told Us the Universe is This Amazing?

Five galaxies as seen with MUSE on ESO’s VLT at several wavelengths of light

Galactic fireworks: new ESO images reveal stunning features of nearby galaxies | ESO

A stunning set of photographs of nearby galaxies and an accompanying video, has been released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). They were obtained by ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT).

By combining these observations with data from their partner, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), they are shedding new light on the what triggers gas clouds to condense to form these galaxies, the details of which remain a mystery.

How Science Works - Settling Small Differences Over the Age of the Universe

A portion of a new picture of the oldest light in the universe taken by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. This part covers a section of the sky 50 times the moon’s width, representing a region of space 20 billion light-years across. The light, emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, varies in polarization (represented here by redder or bluer colors). Astrophysicists used the spacing between these variations to calculate a new estimate for the universe’s age.

Credit: ACT Collaboration

New View of Nature’s Oldest Light Adds Twist to Debate Over Universe’s Age | Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences Cornell Arts & Sciences

For the last year or so, debate has raged in the Astrophysics community over the real age of the Universe, although 'raged' may be an overstatement in the sense in which it is normally used.

As always, 'raging' debate in science is conducted in quiet, polite, considerate and respectful terms and normally centres around the finer details of statistical analysis, data collection and accuracy, etc, and rarely around personality, since ad hominems have no place in rational, dispassionate debate in which facts are neutral and opinion is led by evidence.

The problem was that there were two methods for calculating the age of the universe based on how we calculate the speed at which galaxies are moving away from one another to calculate the rate of expansion of the Universe - a quantity called the Hubble Constant - and disagreement centred around how accurately we measured that constant.

Science Has Confirmed a Theory Explaining the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe

Optical image of the Abell 3391/95 system

© Reiprich et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics

Longest intergalactic gas filament discovered — Universität Bonn

I don't normally write about cosmology and astro-physics because they are not subjects in which I have any particular expertise but the findings of a team of researchers from Bonn, Germany, are interesting from a general science point of view in that they confirm our ideas about the early formation of the Universe are correct. It's also good to have a theory I described in What Makes You So Special? From the Big Bang To You confirmed by science.

In particular, the scientists confirm models which explain why the Universe is grainy, with stars, galaxies and super-clusters, and not smooth and amorphous as a simple understanding of mathematics that ignore quantum fluctuations seems to predict.

In this simplistic model, atoms should be evenly distributed so there would be no reason for gravity to pull it into clumps to form denser regions. However, small differences produced by quantum fluctuations should produce small areas of increased density where gravity was higher than the surrounding space, so nearby matter would tend to move towards these centres.

Computer simulations predict that this would leave the Universe looking somthing like a sponge with large 'empty' spaces connected by thin filaments of rarified gas forming a basic matrix, and this is exactly what the researchers have found.

Signals From Space - Keep Calm and Carry On!

Source of mysterious deep space radio wave discovered for the first time | Science | The Guardian

Scientists have identified the source of a pulse of radio signals first detected in 2016 of a type only known about since 2007.

The so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) most probably came from a dwarf galaxy some 3 billion light years from Earth, so the pulse only began its journey when Earth was just a few million years old, maybe when life was just getting going.

But it's nothing for alien conspiracists to get excited over; nor is it anything for creationists to start to panic over. It almost certainly isn't a signal from some other intelligence in a distant galaxy. However, exactly what it is is still a bit of a mystery.

Not So Finely Tuned!

EN-L2Pup-SPHERE ALMA: Composite sight of L₂ Pup in visible light (by the VLT / SPHERE instrument, blue) and ALMA continuum light (orange). The light from the central star is subtracted from the ALMA image to better show as candidate planet.

© P. Kervella et al. (CNRS / U. de Chile / Observatoire de Paris / Lesia / ESO / ALMA)

ALMA observations of the nearby AGB star L₂ Puppis | Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A)

With that splendidly panglossian view of the Universe that is so endearing about creationists, they like to imagine they live in the best of all worlds in the best of all galaxies in the best of all Universes - a Universe their special best friend made specially for them.

They have even invented a wonderfully circular argument to try to justify that starry-eyed (or is that rose-tinted?) view. They call it the 'Finely Tuned Universe' theory.

Basically, this says that because the Universe is obviously a suitable place for a sun with a planet on which human life evolved, the Universe must be set up in such a way to make this possible. Because the entity who set it up that way is perfect and all-loving and loves humans above everything else, Earth must be the best possible for humans to live on. And because it is the best possible place, the Universe must have been tuned to produce it.

Gravity Waving Goodbye To Big Bang Doubts?

Gravitational waves: Scientists might be about to announce detection of 'ripples in the fabric of spacetime' | Independent.

It looks like creationists are about to be hit with another scientific discovery they are going to have to work hard to ignore, as another gap slams shut and no god was found in it.

There are persistent rumours in the scientific world that a team working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) system will announce tomorrow that they have discovered 'primordial gravity waves'. These are gravity waves from the first moments of the Big Bang and, if confirmed, could increase our knowledge of exactly what happened in that first few microseconds of the Universe's existence.

Creationism Fails! Universe Didn't Need A God To Exist

Short distance physics of the inflationary de Sitter universe - IOPscience.

A team of Canadian theoretical physicists claim to have solved the question of how the Universe arose from nothing. And guess what? It didn't need a magic creator; it can all be explained in materialist terms.

Now, I don't have the maths or detailed knowledge of physics to be able to fully understand the underlying principles they used, let alone to be able to explain it in simple terms, so I'm dependant on what others have said.