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Creation 39(1):53, January 2017

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‘Star witnesses’ to a young creation

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stars

We cannot use science to prove the age of the universe because science can only deal with what is observable now. We can measure the rates of all manner of things in the present. However, to use these as ‘clocks’ to estimate ages, we have to assume a history, which in turn depends upon our beliefs about where we came from. The Bible gives us an eyewitness record of what happened, the order, and the timeframe, which ‘science’ cannot tell us.

Nevertheless, today’s widespread belief in a very old universe fails to account for many ‘clocks’ that indicate a far younger age. Here are two.1

Blue stars in galaxies

Blue stars are the biggest and brightest of all ‘main sequence’ stars, but this means they burn up their nuclear fuel very fast. Indeed, they burn so fast that the biggest ones could not last more than a million years, and the smallest around 10 million years. Yet blue stars abound in spiral galaxies, including our Milky Way. This suggests that these galaxies cannot be even one million years old. This problem for the belief that the galaxies are billions of years old is ‘solved’ by assuming the blue stars formed more recently than the rest of the galaxy. However, no one has observed such star formation and there is not even a viable mechanism for it to happen.2

Neutron stars in globular clusters

Globular clusters are compact, ball-shaped groups of stars that orbit the centre of a galaxy. They supposedly contain ‘very old’ stars. The secular big bang story has great difficulty explaining them.3 Astronomers have seen many fast-moving neutron stars in globular clusters. These are thought to arise from supernovas (exploding stars) within the cluster, where a neutron star is created that is ‘kicked’ out at very high speed. With the compact sizes of globular clusters and the high speed of the neutron stars, all neutron stars should be ejected from such clusters in less than two million years. Many globular clusters should have emptied in a few thousand years. A major study of this so-called ‘retention problem’ called it a “long-standing mystery”.4 These observations, too, are consistent with a young age of the universe.

Posted on homepage: 24 October 2018

References and notes

  1. 101 evidences for recent creation are provided in the article at creation.com/age. Return to text.
  2. Lisle, J., Blue stars confirm recent creation, Acts & Facts 41(9):16, 2012; icr.org. Return to text.
  3. Hubble observations cast further doubt on how globular clusters formed; astronomy.com; 20 November 2014. Return to text.
  4. Pfahl, E., Rappaport, S., and Podsiadlowski, P., A comprehensive study of neutron star retention in globular clusters, Astrophysical Journal 573:283–305, 2002; | doi:10.1086/340494.
    Thanks to Paul Nethercott for alerting us to this ‘clock’. Return to text.