and other data from Pluto. Did the data support the belief that Pluto
evolved over millions of years, or was it created recently? Pluto: another young planet, this week on
Creation Magazine LIVE! Welcome to Creation Magazine LIVE! My name is Richard Fangrad. And I'm Thomas Bailey. Now, this week on Creation Magazine LIVE we're
going to have a look at Pluto, the planet Pluto (or former planet, Pluto).
In July of 2015 the New Horizons spacecraft
made a phenomenally successful flyby of Pluto and its moons and scientists were able to
compare their theories about Pluto with actual data from the spacecraft. We'll focus on that in a few minutes, but
let's begin with a bit of background on Pluto. Pluto orbits 40 times further out from the
sun than Earth, and for over 70 years it was regarded as the ninth planet of our solar system. Clyde Tombaugh, pictured here at the door
of the Pluto discovery telescope, the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, discovered Pluto in 1930 by comparing photographs of stars taken two weeks apart.
Before that Percival Lowell, the founder of
that observatory, believed in the existence of a ninth planet because of perceived irregularities
in the motion of Uranus. He dubbed it Planet X and calculated that
it would be six times more massive than Earth. He even specified its location. Lowell searched for the planet without success
from 1906 until 1916 when he died.
Tombaugh was hired by the observatory in 1929 and discovered the planet near where Lowell suggested. This apparently vindicated Lowell's predictions
so the discovery was appropriately announced on Lowell's birthday (13th March) and the
first two letters of Pluto's name are his initials. Pluto is so faint that it can only be seen
with a telescope with a diameter of 30 cm or larger, and astronomers back then were
unable to determine its size and mass. Early estimates could only rely on the deviations
of the orbits of Neptune and Uranus.
But even with these measurements the size
was quickly revised down from Lowell's estimate, and eventually astronomers settled on a mass
about three quarters that of Earth. That's right. All this changed around 1978, nearly 50 years
after Pluto's initial discovery. The key evidence was found by James Christy
of the US Naval Observatory when he realized that Pluto has a moon.
He noticed that some of the images from their
1.5 Metre telescope showed Pluto to be slightly elongated but the stars in the same
photographs were not. From those images, he was able to estimate
the diameter of the moon's orbit and its orbital period. As a result, astronomers could calculate the
mass of Pluto with far more certainty. It is now accepted that Pluto is only 1/500th
of the mass of the earth.
Whoa! OK. Further observations confirmed Pluto's moon,
and the International Astronomical Union gave it official status in 1985 and named it Charon. Right off the bat we can learn some lessons from Pluto. With such a tiny mass, Pluto could not possibly
have affected the orbits of the gas giants of Uranus and Neptune.
So, what's going on? Is there some other reason for the orbits
being affected? In 1983 astronomers searched the entire sky
using the Infrared Astronomical Satellite but no hidden planet was found. It's now generally believed that the perceived
irregularities to the orbits of Uranus and Neptune were imaginary, that Lowell's
calculations were wrong, and Tombaugh's discovery was a coincidence. Amazing! The question is, how could so many scientists
be wrong for so long about the mass of Pluto by a factor of 400? A similar question is often asked of biblical
creationists when we speak of the earth being around 6,000 years old instead of the generally
accepted much older age of 4.6 Billion years. That's right.
The mass of Pluto, like the age of the earth,
hasn't been measured directly. It's calculated from scientific models that
are all based on assumptions. All the scientists got the same wrong answers because they all used the same models
and the same assumptions. However, ongoing observations of the behaviour
of Pluto led to more information that enabled an entirely different approach to the problem,
overturning the previous assumptions and coming up with a radically new and soundly-based estimate.
OK. Now, there's another big difference. The mass of Pluto is operational science,
where we can continue to make observations in the present using newer and better instruments
and technology. But the age of the earth is a historical matter.
We can't travel back in time to make observations
of things that happened in the past. For information about the past we need reliable
reports from eyewitnesses. And that's exactly what the Bible is. It's a reliable report written by men who
were guided by God so that they wrote an error free account of history.
And by basing our scientific models on that
history, our hypotheses about how the universe might operate are usually much closer to the
observations, once they come in. Pluto is a great example of that, and we'll
show you that when we get back. Have you ever wondered how Noah would have
fitted dinosaurs on the ark? For example, how would a large sauropod like
brachiosaurus even get in the door? This question is often used to challenge the
validity of the Bible, but new research has provided a stunning answer. By studying the growth rings in dinosaur bones,
scientists have discovered that dinosaurs underwent a tremendous adolescent growth spurt.
Take, for example, the huge Apatosaurus. Scientists have hypothesized that their growth
spurt started at about five years of age, when they weighed one ton. During the spurt however, they put on about
five tons per year, until they reached about twenty-five tons. The Bible tells us that God brought the animals
to Noah for the ark voyage, therefore, it's reasonable to assume that God would have chosen
young dinosaurs that hadn't yet undergone their growth spurt.
So yes, there was plenty of room for brachiosaurus. To find out more from Creation Ministries
International, visit our website CREATION.Com Alright, if you've just tuned in, this week
we're talking about a recent flyby, back in 2015, of Pluto. We can compare what scientists predicted with
what they actually found. That's right.
By the way, it took a lot of intelligent design
to outfit the New Horizons spacecraft, 'fly' it for 9 and a half years, and operate it
with just one shot at success. Right, yes. To reach such a distant object, the New Horizons
spacecraft was launched from the earth at a greater speed than any spacecraft to ever
leave earth's orbit. The spacecraft travelled at a speed of 15
km per second on its way to Pluto.
And that's why it was only able to make one pass. It just wasn't possible to include enough
fuel in such a spacecraft to slow it down enough to orbit the planet or to make more
than one pass. The New Horizons spacecraft is about the size
of a grand piano and is packed with a variety of scientific instruments. There's an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer
for gas measurements, a special multispectral imaging system for various mapping operations,
an infrared spectrometer, a radiometer (for gas measurements), a solar wind detector,
a particle spectrometer, a dust collector, and a very high-resolution CCD imager with
a telephoto lens for taking high quality photos.
Alright. Everything but the kitchen sink there! So, what did they expect to find? And why were they so surprised with the "real"
Pluto, and its large moon Charon, and the subsequently-discovered small moons Nix, Styx,
Hydra, and Kerberos? We can measure the 'surprise effect' by
comparing it to writings from the 1990s, for example. The last great textbook on planetary science,
The New Solar System, authored by leading planetologists, had a chapter on "Triton,
Pluto and Charon" by Dale P. Cruikshank.
Triton (that's the large moon of Neptune)
had been visited in 1989 by Voyager 2 and scientists had reason to suspect that Pluto
might share some of its characteristics, since both of them were classified as Kuiper Belt objects. But Triton had shocked scientists with its
evidence of recent activity and 'water volcanism'. To account for the activity, they invoked
a potential heat source: tidal pulls from Neptune over millions of years. At Pluto except for small interactions with
Charon no such heat source exists.
No. In 1998, scientists knew of light and dark
regions on Pluto from the Hubble telescope, and they detected that it had an atmosphere
around Pluto containing nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide; and some hydrocarbons. They knew about Charon, but were surprised
that its surface was quite different than Pluto's, composed mostly of water ice. Really? Knowing that Pluto had passed its closest
point to the sun in 1990 and was moving away from the sun, Cruikshank speculated that the
atmosphere might collapse within a couple of decades saying, "Maybe the entire planet
will turn uniformly white as the entire, already pitifully thin, atmosphere collapses in a
global freeze-out!" Seventeen years into that prediction, the
atmosphere remains surprisingly dynamic.
Yeah it's still here. How did Pluto form? Cruikshank cited opinions of theorists who later became
lead scientists for the New Horizons spacecraft. Here's the "most likely" scenario: "Alan
Stern, William McKinnon, and Jonathan Lunine have proposed that Pluto formed in a near-circular,
low-inclination heliocentric orbit, probably beyond Neptune's position. A great many other icy planetesimals also
accreted in the solar nebula beyond Neptune, becoming the original population of the Kuiper Belt.
The gravity of Neptune perturbed these bodies
as they accumulated, resulting in frequent collisions among them. Eventually Pluto managed to garner considerable mass. Later, the powerful impact of a fairly large
planetesimal with Pluto resulted in the formation of Charon. This hypothetical impact may also explain
why Pluto's rotational axis is tipped so extremely." There you have it.
Now, thanks to New Horizons, we can see the
real Pluto system. And we can hear the reactions of these same
scientists after their long wait for the observations. "Who would have expected this kind of complexity?"
Said principal scientist Alan Stern after the first images came in. Pluto's surface is quote "every bit as
complex as that of Mars," one said.
Some commented on how earth-like some surface
features appear to be. And one thing stands out to everyone:
Pluto looks young! Yeah! National Geographic reported that the surface
images stunned scientists with evidence of glaciers, geysers, and mountains of ice 3,350
m (11,000 feet) high, rivalling the Rockies. The landscape, quote "looks relatively young so
young, in fact, that it suggests the planet is still geologically active." That's a surprise. Pluto has large areas with no craters, implying
recent resurfacing in those areas.
The geologist for the New Horizons spacecraft
said, "The discovery of vast, craterless, very young plains on Pluto exceeds all pre-flyby expectations." Wow! According to the secular scientists, Pluto
has been bombarded by other objects in the Kuiper Belt for billions of years. The quote "most stunning thing" about
this initial image of Pluto's southeast quadrant is that not a single impact crater
was found. "This means this is a very young surface,"
team member John Spencer said. How young? He guessed it is (quote) "less than a hundred
million years old, which is a small fraction of the 4-and-a-half billion year age of the
solar system" No kidding! That's only 1/45 of that time span! Actually, "It might be active right now,"
he added.
"With no craters, you just can't put a
lower limit on how active it might be." Amazing, yeah. Some big surprises for the evolutionary
notions of Pluto. More when we come back. Are you skeptical about Christianity? Perhaps you're a Christian but know someone
who won't consider Christianity.
Christianity for Skeptics is one of CMI's
most popular books. Written by Drs Steve Kumar and Jonathan Sarfati,
this powerful resource refutes many attacks on the Christian faith. It contains cutting edge research, solid theology
and a summary of the Christian roots of science. Questions about Islam, atheism, suffering,
evidence for God, and more are answered.
Full of bright, catchy illustrations and a
sleek, modern style, this book draws in any reader. Purchase this resource, and many others at
CREATION.Com On this week's episode we're talking about
how recent discoveries about Pluto didn't fit with evolutionary predictions, but they
actually do fit biblical predictions. And that's really the point of this episode today. Yes, it is.
You might be wondering how today's discussion
impacts your Christian life. I mean, what does Pluto have to do with you? Ultimately, it has to do with the authority
and accuracy of the Bible. All our information about how to be saved,
for example, and what God has done to save sinners comes from the Bible, so Christians
need to be very sure that it really is accurate. That's right.
Even if Christians have never thought about
the Bible that way, all of us Christians need to be sure that at least those parts of the
Bible that record the details of Jesus' death and resurrection are recorded accurately. Right, yeah, those parts at least! Our salvation depends on those parts. In 1 Corinthians 15:17 Paul says, "if
Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins." We need to be very, very sure that that part
is accurate, right? But the Bible records more than just the details
about Jesus life, death and resurrection. There's more there.
That's right. 2 Timothy 3: 16-17 says, "All Scripture
is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and
for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every
good work." All Scripture! The whole Bible is God's word. And if it really is the word of one who knows
everything about everything, then all of it is accurate, including the history it records
from the beginning of creation. Yeah.
Since that's the case, Bible-believing scientists
can, and are using it, instead of the millions-of-years evolutionary history, to build scientific
models about the origin of the solar system. Those models make various predictions about
what will be found when the data comes in. Today, we're looking at some of the data
that came in about Pluto and the data fits the Biblically-based models much better than
it does the evolutionary models. So what's the point? The point is that the data provides support
for the accuracy of the Bible, and that should be very encouraging to all Christians.
Right! It's a clue that we haven't been taken
in by some cult or been duped into believing something that isn't true. Like the Apostle Peter wrote, we didn't
follow cleverly devised fables when we told you about the Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of those things, Peter says, that we reported. These things are true, is what he's saying. OK, so let's get back to Pluto.
It's not just surface features that indicate
Pluto is young, the atmosphere is also young. Scientists measured the escape rate of nitrogen
at 500 tons per hour. That's 500 times the rate at Mars. All of Pluto's nitrogen should have been
depleted eons ago.
This is such a problem that scientists who
continue to believe Pluto is about 4 and a half billion years old propose that comets
resupplied the nitrogen, but all the proposed sources put together appear inadequate. Charon is young, too! It shows signs of resurfacing and includes canyons five to ten kilometres (three to six miles) deep. How could this small body, about half the
diameter of Pluto, be active? Eric Hand wrote in Science magazine, "This
was unexpected because many thought that the internal heat sources within Pluto and Charon,
leftover from their formation in a giant impact billions of years ago, would have dissipated long ago,". Deputy Project Scientist Cathy Olkin said
at a press conference, "Originally I thought Charon might be an ancient terrain covered
in craters, many on the team thought that might be the case." They were wrong.
Dropping the assumption of billions of years
resolves these problems. Christians should be pleased, but not surprised,
to see young surfaces on the planets. The New Horizons data provides evidence that
the solar system cannot be billions of years old. It's consistent with the Bible's timeframe
of thousands of years.
And we'll be back. Many people scoff at the idea that all humans
descended from a woman called Eve only thousands of years ago. But geneticists actually endorse a similar
idea, known as mitochondrial Eve. By studying the DNA in cell parts known as
mitochondria, scientists propose that all humans descended from a single woman that
lived 200,000 years ago.
But this date relies on evolutionary assumptions,
chief of which is the idea chimpanzees and humans shared a common ancestor 6 million
years ago. However, actual research has shown that mitochondrial
DNA mutates much faster than this evolutionary estimate, and this drastically
reduces mitochondrial Eve's age. This would mean that mitochondrial Eve, as a review in the prestigious journal 'Science' said: 'lived about 6500 years ago a figure clearly incompatible with current theories on human origins.' But it is compatible with the Bible's history. To find out more from Creation Ministries
International, visit our website CREATION.Com Our subject this week is Pluto, another young planet.
[Even though, we know, it's been demoted
as a planet.] We could actually do a show, like this, on
each of the planets, pointing out features that don't fit with evolution and millions
of years but support Biblical history. That's right. There were other surprises (for evolutionists)
that came from Pluto's moons. Most inner moons in the solar system keep
one face pointed towards their central planet.
This is claimed to have resulted from a gravitational
tidal locking effect that is evidence for the very old age of the solar system (allegedly
about 5 billion years). Right, and due to the fact that the moons
are not point objects, but have heavier and lighter areas throughout, gravitational theory
tells us that 'tidal friction' causes the moons to eventually tidally lock to their
respective planets after a very long period of time, leaving one face of the moon always
pointed at their parent planet, as you just described. Now, from Earth, we only ever see one side
of our own moon. So, the moons rotate on their axis once per
revolution around their parent planet, that's basically what that means.
But this animation from NASA shows that this certainly
isn't the case with the small moons of Pluto. Instead, they behave like spinning tops. In the animation, you can see Pluto is shown
at centre with its moons Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. New analysis has found that the 4 smaller
moons Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra rotate very fast.
Yeah. Kerberos spins the slowest, once every 5.33
Hours, whereas Hydra is the whirling dervish of a planet that's out there, rotating once
every 26 minutes. Planetary scientist Mark Showalter of NASA's
New Horizons mission said this, "These Pluto moons are essentially spinning tops, and that
radically changes the way we understand the dynamics of how they operate This is unlike
anything we've seen elsewhere in the solar system No one has ever seen a moon (like
Hydra) that rotates 89 times during a single orbit." In addition, towards the end of the video
one moon is illustrated with its spin axis precessing or rotating, just like a spinning top. This usually indicates a recent disturbance.
Could it mean a recent creation? Hey, maybe! And where does this leave uniformitarian theory
for the formation of the solar system? It's in big trouble! But don't worry, this isn't the first
time evolutionary expectations aren't supported when the data comes in, by the data. They'll come up with some hypothesis to try to make the
data fit with a billions-of-years timescale. That's right. Also, notice in the NASA animation that Nix
rotates backwards, similar to the way the planet Venus orbits the sun.
Nix is shown going clockwise while the others
all go counter-clockwise. And that's not all. Nix is also on its side, similar to the planet
Uranus (which has about a 98 degrees tilt to the plane of the solar system). These are anomalies that run contrary to the
uniformitarian principle that the solar system formed out of a nebula cloud of gas and dust.
In that scenario, all angular momentum is
directed in the same plane. So how can individual planets and moons spin backwards? Right! The earth's moon was created in a near perfect
circular orbit and tidally locked. Why? For purposes of stability to the Earth's tides
and other designed-for-life features here on earth. Likewise, planets with tidally locked moons
were created that way, as well as the retrograde motion of Venus' spin, for example.
Naturalistic theories and methods fail on
all counts to account for these kinds of features. In the case of Pluto, the moons may be smaller
Kuiper Belt objects that have been captured. Pluto itself may be such, since it has a highly
eccentric orbit, even out of the plane of the rest of the planets. And the high spin rates of its moons testify
at least that such an event did not occur billions of years ago, or else they would
be tidally locked today.
That's right. A created solar system, which is only 6,000
years old, or so, is consistent with these observations. And it's also consistent with tidally locked
moons and the varying rotation directions of some objects in the solar system. A recent creation is a far simpler explanation
for the formation of this system.
This whole event of the New Horizons flyby
of Pluto is typical of what happens when spacecraft send data back from planets. So many times the reaction from evolutionists
is, "Wow, we weren't expecting that!" It's so much more fulfilling if you just
start with Scripture. The hypotheses tend to match the observations
much more closely. That's right! Now, much of the content for this week's
show came from articles from Creation magazine and the Journal of Creation.
If you want more details than we've been
able to cover here today, you can find those articles on creation.Com - just do a search
on "Pluto" in the search window. We're going to be right back to discuss
some feedback that we received. For a more in-depth understanding of topics
relating to the creation/evolution debate, the Journal of Creation contains peer-reviewed
research papers that support the biblical account of Creation, the Flood and the Fall. One subscriber said: "I always assumed that
this journal would be too academic for me not so.
I am a Christian with a very enquiring mind. With each issue I find powerful articles that open doors
and shine light on my understanding of the world." Each Journal of Creation is more than 120
pages and published 3 times per year. To subscribe visit Creation.Com! As we wrap things up here, we're going to
look at an article in the 'Feedback' section on creation.Com. People often send in questions that one of
the CMI staff answers.
We titled this one, "How does God relate to time?" Yeah, hold on to your hats Part of the email reads, "You said in one
of your articles that any angel that does something in a sequence has created a sort
of time as an idea of sequential events. I was thinking that this must relate to God
in the fact that He did create the universe and he existed before the universe he obviously
does not transcend sequence in eternity Also, there was no information other than
God before he started creating, so how did he think? He also would have had to at one point
start thinking, obviously, because each thought is sequential." In episode 3 of this season we talked about
the question, "If God created the universe then who created God?" And this is a related topic. Shaun Doyle responded, "But there are different
ways of construing God's eternity available to the Christian because the Bible doesn't
fully explain the nature of God's relation to time. One is called omnitemporality, which means
that God has existed for an infinite duration of objectively temporal moments.
This idea has become somewhat fashionable
among some modern Christian philosophers. However, I see a deep incoherence in the idea. It seems impossible to count sequentially
from negative infinity to 0, much less negative infinity to infinity. This means there can't be an infinite series of moments.
Even God's omnipotence is irrelevant here,
because not even omnipotence can do the logically impossible (such as make 2 plus 2 equal 5,
or make a married bachelor)." OK. And it gets even better: "Another way of thinking about God's eternity is to say that He is essentially timeless. The common statement 'God is outside of
time' reflects this general view of God's eternity. This means that God is completely static;
even His thinking does not change at all.
This has been the traditional view of the
church ever since at least the 4th and 5th centuries, largely due to the church father
Augustine. However, this view of God is hard to reconcile
with the dynamic relational depiction of God in the Bible, and especially Christ's Incarnation It also means that God is not really related
to His creation in an objective temporal sense. The only way He is said to 'change' and
'relate' with respect to creation is as other beings around Him have a subjective
experience of change. This is like how a father might appear to
his son to get shorter through the years, when in fact the father's height has remained constant The 'change' in the father is merely apparent
and subjective; it's not objectively real." Wow! Now, we don't expect all of you to follow
along with that but notice how Shaun was outlining different possible answers, different concepts,
yet they were all Scripturally-based.
If you're into thinking about these kinds of concepts,
there are articles on the website that do that. But, we're going to end here and we'll
see you next week..
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