Silly Bible - More Evidence Of The Laughable Naivety Of The Bible's Primitive Authors

This image of the galaxy REBELS-25 was taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international facility co-owned by ESO. It shows how cold gas is distributed in the galaxy, and exhibits hints of an elongated bar structure at its centre.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/
L. Rowland et al.

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This image shows the motion of cold gas in the REBELS-25 galaxy as seen with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Blue colouring indicates movement towards Earth and red indicates movement away from Earth, with a darker shade representing faster movement. In this case, the red-blue divide of the image shows clearly that the object is rotating, making REBELS-25 the most distant rotating disc galaxy ever discovered.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/L. Rowland et al.

Space oddity: Most distant rotating disc galaxy found | ESO

It looks like it's the turn of cosmologists to casually refute creationism by revealing the facts - normally the privilege of biologists and archaeologists who do so with almost every science paper they publish. But of course it would also be difficult for cosmologists to reveal anything about the cosmos that doesn't make those who described it as consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it, look like anything other than ignorant simpletons who can't be taken seriously.

But of course, they were probably expert at being cattle-herding pastoralists, quite familiar with their few square miles of the Bronze Age Middle East; they just didn't know anything about science or history, so made up tales to fill the gap in their understanding.

Here for example is another cosmology paper showing just how old, immense and awe-inspiring the real Universe is, by reporting the discovery of a stable, rotating disc galaxy, rather like our own Milky Way galaxy, but from just 700 million years after the Big Bang. As such, REBEL-25 is the most distant rotating disc galaxy yet discovered. The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by cosmologists from Leiden University, The Netherlands, using data from the European Southern Observatory, Chile.

They have just published their findings in Monthly Notices of the Astronomical Society and announced it in a press release from the European Southern Observatory:

Silly Bible - How The Description of the Universe in Genesis was Laugably Naïve

This artist’s impression of a planet-forming disk surrounding a young star shows a swirling "pancake" of hot gas and dust from which planets form. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers obtained detailed images showing the layered, conical structure of disk winds – streams of gas blowing out into space.

National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

Winds of change: James Webb Space Telescope reveals elusive details in young star systems | University of Arizona News

Source

I keep returning to the contrast between how the universe is described in Genesis and how it really is as described by science because it illustrates better than almost anything else in the Bible, the naivety and sheer ignorance of the authors. A creator god who wanted us to understand the magnificence of its creation would surely have done a better job of explaining it than to have described it as a small flat planet with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, with the sun, moon and stars as lights stuck to the dome.

This description is so far removed from reality that none of it can plausibly be described as allegorical or metaphorical, or even a simplistic description intended to inform simple, uneducated people incapable of understanding anything more complicated. It is simply and laughably wrong; but exactly what parochial pastoralists might think from their limited perspective.

And these same parochial, naïve people came up with the notion of gods to explain the world around them whose working were so mysterious as to look like magic - and magic requires a magician. Where better to locate that magician? Above the dome over the Earth, obviously.

And so religions were built on the best guesses of people who knew no better; people whose best guess was that the Universe consisted of a small flat planet with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out; people who saw no contradiction in describing the creation of light before the creation of the source of light, or the creation of green plants before the sun!

But how could they, with no technology more complicated than a potter's wheel and the visual acuity of the human eye, possibly know what was really going on as they looked up at the 'little lights stuck to the dome'? How could they possibly have been aware that this Earth is in orbit round the sun, that the sun is but one of half a trillion suns in one of half a trillion galaxies, all existing in a vast, expanding universe in which more than 3000 new stars are being born every second, most of them with an accretion disc from which planets will eventually coalesce?

Had they done so, and had they told us about it, then, and only then, would the notion that a creator god was inspiring them to explain the magnificence of its creation be even a plausible explanation for how they knew that stuff. As it is, all we are left to explain is why they were so ignorant of reality that they needed to invent stories to fill the gaps in their understanding, and of course, the gods they created exactly fitted those gaps, just as todays gods are precisely tailored to fill the gaps in the understanding of ignorant people.

So, how do we know they got things so badly wrong?

Bible Blunder - Or How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People

Supernovae circled in blue

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JADES Collaboration

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.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JADES Collaboration.

NASA’s Webb Opens New Window on Supernova Science - NASA Science

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 \( 299,792,458 \) meters per second. The formula to calculate the time it takes for light to travel a certain distance is: \[ \text{Time} = \frac{\text{Distance}}{\text{Speed}} \] Plugging in the values: \[ \text{Time} = \frac{2 \, \text{meters}}{299,792,458 \, \text{meters/second}} \] Let's calculate this: \[ \text{Time} \approx 6.67 \times 10^{-9} \, \text{seconds} \] 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]

Bible Blunder - What The Bible's Authors Could Never Have Guessed At, Again

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures a triple-star star system.

NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I)
Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)]

The box in the ground-based image reveals the location of Hubble’s view within the wider context of this triple-star system. NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America); Inset: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T.A. Rector

University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF's NOIRLab

Hubble Views the Dawn of a Sun-like Star - NASA Science

Standing in stark contrast with how the authors of the Bible guessed the Universe was like, we have this tiny fraction of it as revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows some of the earliest stars in formation:

Looking like a glittering cosmic geode, a trio of dazzling stars blaze from the hollowed-out cavity of a reflection nebula in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The triple-star system is made up of the variable star HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3. HP Tau is known as a T Tauri star, a type of young variable star that hasn’t begun nuclear fusion yet but is beginning to evolve into a hydrogen-fueled star similar to our Sun. T Tauri stars tend to be younger than 10 million years old ― in comparison, our Sun is around 4.6 billion years old ― and are often found still swaddled in the clouds of dust and gas from which they formed.

As with all variable stars, HP Tau’s brightness changes over time. T Tauri stars are known to have both periodic and random fluctuations in brightness. The random variations may be due to the chaotic nature of a developing young star, such as instabilities in the accretion disk of dust and gas around the star, material from that disk falling onto the star and being consumed, and flares on the star’s surface. The periodic changes may be due to giant sunspots rotating in and out of view.

Curving around the stars, a cloud of gas and dust shines with their reflected light. Reflection nebulae do not emit visible light of their own, but shine as the light from nearby stars bounces off the gas and dust, like fog illuminated by the glow of a car’s headlights.

The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 3-18 and Daniel 8:10.

HP Tau is located approximately 550 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Hubble studied HP Tau as part of an investigation into protoplanetary disks, the disks of material around stars that coalesce into planets over millions of years.

The description of the Universe as a small, flat planet with a dome over it and stars stuck to the underside of the dome, was the best guess of simple Bronze Age pastoralists who only knew their small area of the Middle East and described what they thought they saw. Of course, that nonsense about the stars shaking loose from the dome and falling to earth during earthquakes was a stretch of the imagination too far. That should have raised doubt in the minds of those who decided to incorporate the Bronze Age pastoralists' naive description in a book they declared to be the inerrant word of an omniscient creator god, but then they probably knew no better themselves.

But now we do, so the ludicrously childish description of the Universe compared to the reality of the Universe as science is now revealing it, should, in the mind of any objective, rational person, raise considerable doubt about the value of the rest of the book, declared by the same compilers to be an accurate record of science and history.

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe Is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said...

The James Webb Space Telescope observed 19 nearby face-on spiral galaxies in near- and mid-infrared light

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), PHANGS Team, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)

NASA’s Webb Depicts Staggering Structure in 19 Nearby Spiral Galaxies - NASA Science

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

Face-on spiral galaxy, NGC 628, is split diagonally in this image: The James Webb Space Telescope’s observations appear at top left, and the Hubble Space Telescope’s on bottom right. Webb and Hubble’s images show a striking contrast, an inverse of darkness and light. Why? Webb’s observations combine near- and mid-infrared light and Hubble’s showcase visible light. Dust absorbs ultraviolet and visible light, and then re-emits it in the infrared. In Webb's images, we see dust glowing in infrared light. In Hubble’s images, dark regions are where starlight is absorbed by dust.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), and the PHANGS team

Continuing with the theme of how different the universe really is compared to the laughably naive description of it in the Bible where the sun, moon and stars were stuck to a dome over Earth above which there was just water. And the stars could even be shaken loose by earthquakes when they would fall to Earth and could be trampled on by goats.

By contrast, here are the latest clutch of images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). They are all of face-on spiral galaxies taken in the infra-red spectrum. Compare them to the description in Genesis where the entire Universe has a small, flat Earth at the centre of it.

Bible Blunders - How Bronze Age Goat-Herders Described The Universe - And How It Really Is

N79, a star-forming region in the Large Megallanic Cloud

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, O. Nayak, M. Meixner

The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-18

Galactic Genesis: Webb Space Telescope Reveals Massive Star-Forming Complex

If you asked any 6-year-old to draw a picture of what they thought the world with the sky, sun, moon and stars would look like if you could stand outside it, chances are they would come up with something not massively different to the way it is described in Genesis:

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.

Genesis 1:16-18

And it gets even more laughable when you read in Daniel:

Therefore the he goat waxed very great: and when he was strong, the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven. And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. DANI And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them.

Daniel 8:8-10

And it doesn't get any better in the New Testament, where the authors also though Jesus would believe the stars would fall to Earth when they broke loose.

Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.

Matthew 24:29
(Quoting Jesus)

And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken.

Mark 13:25
(Quoting Jesus)

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

Revelation 6:13

Creationism in Crisis - A French 7-Year Scientific Program To Disover The Origin Of Life!

Aerial view of the construction site of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

© G. Hüdepohl (atacamaphoto.com)/ESO

Investigating the origins of life | CNRS News

Although it's nothing to do with evolution, which is the science of how living organisms respond to environmental pressures and diversify over time, abiogenesis is a favourite of creationists because they imagine, without being able to define 'life', that it must involve some magical, God-given quality that turns 'non-life' into 'life'. But then when did facts bother creationists?

So it must be disconcerting to those of them who are still in touch with reality, that 28 French scientific organisations, involving over 100 scientists, have formed a partnership (Programme et Équipement Prioritaire de Recherche - PEPR) led by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (French National Center for Scientific Research - CNRS) to research into the origins of life, not only on Earth but on other planets. The project is already being known as 'Origins'.

According to the CNR News release by Mehdi Harmi:

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said, Grander, More Subtle, More Elegant..

The Crab Nebula seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument)

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, T. Temim (Princeton University).

The Crab Nebula Seen in New Light by NASA’s Webb - NASA

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has gazed at the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Since the recording of this energetic event in 1054 CE by 11th-century astronomers, the Crab Nebula has continued to draw attention and additional study as scientists seek to understand the conditions, behavior, and after-effects of supernovae through thorough study of the Crab, a relatively nearby example.

The Crab Nebula seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

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

The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-10

The Crab Nebula - a tiny fragment of the universe as seen by science:

Creationism in Crisis - How We Can Tell The Bible Is Not The Work Of The God Described in It

A creator god would not have got so much wrong when it tried to describe the world it had created and described is as though it knew no more than a parochial Bronze Age pastoralist who knew almost nothing and had to rely on guess-work and folkloric superstitions from the fearful infancy of our species.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

The universe from descriptions of it in the Bible.

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.

How the Universe really is, as revealed by science:

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:

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.

Amazing Science - James Webb Space Telescope Images

10 times this year the Webb telescope blew us away with new images of our stunning universe

The James Webb Space Telescope

The more we look at the Universe and the more detail we see, the more majestic it becomes. In the words of the late, great carl Sagan:

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

And another quote from Carl Sagan, referring to the famous photo of Earth seen as a tiny pale blue dot from beyond Pluto, because one is never enough:

Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?

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

What would Carl Sagan have made of the images now coming from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)? The final one in the following article is of a segment of sky a fraction the size of a full moon. Tens of thousands of points of light in it each represent a single galaxy. Each of those will contain upwards of half a trillion stars, around each of which there is a good chance of a planetary system and possibly an Earth-like planet orbiting.

Are we so arrogant as to assume this was all made just for us and that a mind-reading creator god scrutinises this one small pixel, watching to see if anyone touches their genitalia, loves the wrong person, works on a Sunday, gets pleasure from sex or has the temerity to question what the priests tell us and to think for ourselves?

The article is by Colin Jacobs, Postdoctoral Researcher in Astrophysics, and Karl Glazebrook, ARC Laureate Fellow & Distinguished Professor, Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing, both of Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, lookt at how the JWST images have blown us away over the past year, revealing a Universe never before seen in this stunning detail. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be seen here.

Ecology News - How Photos From Space Have Changed Our View of Earth And Our Place In The Cosmos

Looking back from beyond the Moon: how views from space have changed the way we see Earth

Earth is a bright pixel when photographed from "Voyager 1" six billion kilometres out (past Pluto).

NASA
Updated by Kevin M. Gill using modern image-processing techniques, 2020

In the words of the late, great Carl Sagan, looking at a picture of a tiny image of Earth seen through one of the rings of Saturn:

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, every hopeful child, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves…… It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

The ludicrous Creationist claim that the Universe is somehow 'fine-tuned' for life is given the lie by the simple realisation that, a short distance from the surface of our planet, life becomes completely untenable in a very hostile environment. Life is 'fine-tuned for Earth because the process of evolution, by which living things became the way they are, is the tuning process.

In the following article reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Professor Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University, Australia, looks at the way images of Earth taken from space, have influenced our thinking about Earth and our place in the Cosmos.

The article is reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here:

Pale Blue Dot - Stunning Photos of Earth from Space

Beni River, Bolivia

These stunning satellite images look like abstract art – and they reveal much about our planet

As a change from exposing the dishonesty and gullibility of creationists and the cynically fraudulent false claims and blatant anti-science, politically-motivated propaganda of their cult leaders, I thought it would be good to see some amazing photographs of our beautiful home in the cosmos, the planet Earth, as seen from space.

This article by Emily Finch of Monash University, Australia, is reprinted from The Conversation's Photos from the Field series, under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here:

Space News - First Exoplanet Photo. No Life Yet, But It's Only a Matter of Time

NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI)

The Webb telescope has released its very first exoplanet image – here's what we can learn from it

NASA's James Webb Space telescope, which is performing much better than expectations, has just produced the first image of an exoplanet. The planet, HIP 65426b, is a gas giant rather like Jupiter, orbiting HIP 65426. It's presence had been inferred from data in 2017.

As a gas giant, it is not suitable for living organisms to have evolved but, with so many exoplanets being discovered, with over 5,000 discovered so far, and so many stars with potential planetary systems, it can't now be long before signs of life are detected on one or more of them.

When that happens, of course, it will destroy any remaining arguments from Creationists that the probability of a self-replicating molecule arising by chance is too small to be credible as an explanation for how life got going on Earth. It will show that, if the conditions are right, chemistry and physics alone are quite capable of producing that and the probability of a planet with those conditions being discovered, increases with every new exoplanet discovered.

The chances of finding such a planet are greater the closer the planetary system is to Earth for the simple reason that telescopes such as the James Webb, see distant objects as they were when the light left them, so a planet say, 10 billion lightyears away, will appear as it was 10 billion years ago. We know it took the Universe 10-11 billion years to give rise to Earth before life could get going some 500 million years later, so distant object may not have had time when we are seeing them, to have reached that stage. Closer objects will have had more time.

The image from the James Webb Space Telescope, and its significance is explained in an open access article in The Conversation by Professor Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland, Australia. The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here.

Comets, Science And Religion

BBC News - Probe makes historic comet landing.

In an astonishing feat of precision engineering and applied science, scientists today landed a probe on the surface of a comet 316 million miles away travelling at 40,000 mph, after a ten year journey of 4 billion miles.

There is a slight concern that the probe might not be anchored firmly to the comet as the harpoons which should have fired into the surface may not have fired. but they are now set to perform scientific experiments