F Rosa Rubicondior: Astronomy
Showing posts with label Astronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Astronomy. Show all posts

Monday 8 January 2024

Bible Blunders - The Ignorant Authors Of Genesis


Voyager 2/ISS images of Uranus and Neptune released shortly after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1986 and 1989, respectively, compared with a reprocessing of the individual filter images in this study to determine the best estimate of the true colours of these planets.

Credit: Professor Patrick Irwin, University of Oxford.
New images reveal what Neptune and Uranus really look like | University of Oxford

You will search the Bible in vain for any mention of the planets of the solar system, let alone a description of them, and the only description of Earth is so laughably childish it's incredible that anyone could take it seriously.

The reason for that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the scientific ignorance of Bronze Age people, but it's a measure of how far science has taken us since those times, and especially since the European Enlightenment when religion first began to lose its suffocating grip on European culture.

The astounding thing is that there are people alive today, living in technologically advanced countries with modern medicines, skyscrapers, satellite communications and navigation system, the Internet, air transport, nuclear power and space exploration, who still believe those simple people from the fearful infancy of our species had a better understanding of the universe than the scientists on whose discoveries their technological society is based.

For example, astronomers are now in the position of being able to have informed debates about the details of planets such as Neptune and Uranus because we have put instruments into space that can send back accurate data to inform those debates. We can now see that what the simple authors or Genesis thought were little lights stuck on a dome over a flat Earth are in reality large planets orbiting a sun which, unlike the description of it in Genesis, is not hanging from the same dome the planets are stuck to, but is a massive body at the centre of a planetary system in one of hundreds of billions of similar suns and planetary systems in one of maybe a trillion other galaxies, none of which would be affected by earthquakes on Earth, let alone fall down when they could be trampled on by a giant goat! [sic] (Daniel 8:10). (Seriously! There really are grown adults who believe that!)

An example of this informed debate was published open access recently in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The research is described in an Oxford University News release:

Wednesday 13 December 2023

Creationism in Crisis - How Wrong The Bible's Authors Were! Why Would Anyone Believe Anything Else They Wrote?


The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-10
NASA’s Webb Stuns With New High-Definition Look at Exploded Star - NASA

The description of the Universe in the Bible is so naïve and radically different to the real universe, it beggars belief that there are grown adults who think the Bible is the inerrant word of a creator god.

There is nothing about the authors' description of it which can be described as allegorical or metaphorical, without the most contorted of mental gymnastics. It is not metaphorical or allegorical; it is quite simply wrong; spectacularly and conspicuously, with no shadow of a doubt, wrong!

What we now know are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with maybe half a trillion stars, many with planetary systems, the authors of the Bible thought were little lights stuck to the underside of a dome over a flat Earth, that can be shaken loose and will fall down to Earth where they can be trampled on by a goat! (Daniel 8:10).

They described this flat Earth with a dome over it as standing on pillars and the fixed and immobile center of the Universe, round which a small sun orbits. They described the sky above the dome as being made of water. Their universe ran on magic.

Wednesday 22 November 2023

Creationism in Crisis - More Elegant Grandeur That The Little Gods' Prophets Never Told Us About


Hidden Wonders: Webb Space Telescope Detects Unexplained Structures in Heart of Milky Way

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
Compare the following images taken by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope with the way the founding prophets of the Abrahamic religions described the Universe.

Tuesday 24 October 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Got The Age of The Moon Wrong! But It's Not Good News For Creationists.


4.46 billion years old
The Moon is 40 million years older than previously thought - Northwestern Now

Scientists have recalculated the age of Earth's moon and found they got it wrong.

But, before creationists start jumping up and down with excitement, it's not good news.

The recalculated age shows the Moon to be, not 4.425 billion years old, but 40 million years older, at 4.46 billion years old. This now makes it 44.6 million percent older than the Universe, which, according to creationist superstition is only 10,000 years old, instead of the 44.25 million percent older that used to be thought.

This means, if creationists want to dispute this new age on the grounds that the dating method used was flawed, they need to show how the 'error' made 100 years look like 44.6 million years, in a universe moreover that they claim to be so finely tuned that altering any of the parameters by even a small amount would make life impossible. Radiometric dating of course depends on the decay rate of unstable isotopes which in turn depends on random quantum fluctuations in the strength of two of the four fundamental forces - the weak and strong nuclear forces.

This new age was arrived at by analysing the zircon crystals in the moon rock brought back by the Apollo 17 moon landing:

Saturday 21 October 2023

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe Is Far Bigger Than Creationist Superstition Says It Should Be



Astronomers detect most distant fast radio burst to date | ESO

From observation of the 'red shift' we know the Universe is expanding and, by calculating the rate of expansion, we can calculate how far away an object is from any point in the Universe such as Earth.

If the creationist superstition were correct, assuming the Universe is expanding at the velocity of light (in fact, it is nowhere near that fast), the farthest objects could be no more than 10,000 light years away. This is the time it would take for light leaving the object to reach Earth, travelling at the velocity of light (186,000 miles per second).

However, an international team of astrophysicists has discovered a remote source of 'fast radio bursts' (FBR) of radio waves lasting less than a millisecond, in a galaxy so far away that its light took eight billion years to reach us! Although this is the farthest FBR source so far discovered, being about 50% farther away than the previous farthest, it is by no means the farthest object so far detected. These are about twice that distance, consistent with the Universe being 14 billion years old. In other words, the Universe has been expanding for much longer than 8 billion years, and for many times longer than the 10,000 years creationists belie.

So, any creationist capable of doing the simple maths should be able to work out that the Universe is far too large and has been expanding far too long for it to have been created 10,000 years ago, by several orders of magnitude.

The location of the FRB source was pinpointed by researchers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and its discovery is explained in an ESO press release:

Sunday 15 October 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Colliding Planets Falsify Creationism


October: Exoplanet collision | News and features | University of Bristol

The reason creationism is so easy to refute is that its claims are simplistic, designed as they are to appeal to those who think like children and who know little or no science.

This means we can construct simple hypotheses and predictions and test them against the real world. When we do that, we invariably find the hypotheses are easily falsifiable and the predictions fail to be fulfilled.

Science readily accepts, for example, that much of the observable universe emerged from chaos under the directional force of gravity, which turns a chaotic system into a progressively ordered system, so galaxies, superclusters, black holes, suns and planetary systems all emerged from the background chaos of the Big Bang and quantum fluctuations. This view of the universe predicts that there is still a degree of chaos and unpredictability about the universe.

M1: The Crab Nebula from Hubble.
The chaotic remnants of an exploding supernova.

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU)
Creationists however, insist that the universe, and everything in it was created in a few days by a perfect, omniscient, god, casting magic spells and commanding everything to appear from nowhere, made out of nothing, in a perfectly ordered and designed universe. It then either micromanages it or sits back and watches while it runs on a prepared a set of rules that govern it (depending on the flavour of creationism and how much the superstition has tried to accommodate science while still believing in magic and the fairy tales they were told in childhood).

So, our simple hypothesis then is that a universe created according to creationist superstitions would be perfectly ordered and free from chaos, and of course had the ultimate purpose of providing humans with somewhere nice to live, like America. Such a well-ordered universe would never have planets colliding, or comets being knocked out of stable orbit in the outer reaches of the solar system and moving into elliptical orbits around the sun, for example. Nor would it have had a minor planet colliding with a young Earth as is believed to account for the Moon and the axis tilt that causes the seasons.

Thursday 12 October 2023

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:

Sunday 8 October 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Astronomers Discover The Early Stages of Planatary Formation - About Which The Bible is Silent


How the Bible's authors saw the Universe.
Press Releases - Astronomers Discover First Step Toward Planet Formation - ALMA

The universe described by the Bronze Age story in the Bible is almost laughable in its naivety, yet there are still ignorant people who think it was accurately described by the creator of it.

It has a flat Earth at the centre, with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, and the sun and moon are lamps hung from the dome to tell us when it’s day or night. All the stars, which we now know are vast galaxies or even superclusters of galaxies, millions of lightyears away, are described as small lights fixed to the inside of the dome, which can shake lose and fall to Earth during earthquakes.

Apart from a magic man speaking some magic words, there is no explanation of how the planet Earth formed, nor any appreciation of planetary systems orbiting a central sun, and of course, no hint that there could be trillions of such planetary systems or the vastness of the Universe.

Of course, you can't really blame the authors who wrote that stuff in the fearful infancy of our species. They were only doing their best with what little knowledge they had. What you can blame though are the ignorant fools who have failed to keep up with scientific discoveries and who still believe those laughably naïve myths are real science and history.

To add to their embarrassment, astronomers have now confirmed what we have suspected for many years now - that planetary systems and planets like Earth form in the accretion discs of second or third generation stars which were formed from condensing clouds of gas and debris produced by exploding earlier stars at the end of their life. These clouds contained not only hydrogen, helium, lithium and lighter elements but also heavier elements produced in the last stages of the earlier sun's demise as it collapsed inwards, forcing the lighter elements in its core to form heavier elements such as iron, calcium, carbon, silicon, oxygen, etc.

As the new sun's gravity pulls these larger elements towards it, angular momentum forces them into a flattened disc orbiting the sun. It was in these discs that the planets condensed around orbitally-stable centres of gravity.

Sunday 17 September 2023

Creationism in Crisis - The Universe is Much Grander and More Magnificant Than Any Religion's Prophets Ever Told Us.


Maisie’s Galaxy.
Not as old as previously thought

NASA (representative image)
Collaboration with global team confirms, disproves distant galaxies | RIT

Cosmologists are making discoveries about the age and nature of celestial bodies almost daily and, as with all science, as the information improves, theories and knowledge are either being abandoned or confirmed, so our understanding of reality improves - which is the entire point of scientific research.

This is in marked contrast with religions, where 'research' consists of trying to find new ways to stick to ancient belief and all apologetics presuppose the answer.

For instance, compare theology to a 'philosophy' based on the assumption that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden who created everything and who demand adoration and worship as the price for not doing something unspeakably unpleasant to you when you die (assuming you'd know about it and could experience it, even though you're dead and won't have a body with a sensory system and functioning brain to experience it with)!

Sound extremely childish and risible?

Yes, it does, doesn't it! And yet theologians command respect and power in society, far greater than should be given to someone because they have an imaginary friend and spends their time trying to make excuses for not having any definitive evidence for their beliefs.

What is giving cosmology this power is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which is sending back hugely improved data of a much higher quality and reliability of anything cosmologists have had to work with before.

For example, in a paper published in Nature a few days ago, by a team of scientists including researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA, cosmologists showed that there are very many more ancient galaxies whose red shift dates them to the very early universe, but that a candidate for the oldest such galaxy is in fact much younger than previously thought. This is because the JWST is able to measure the red shift with far greater accuracy than was previously possible.

Tuesday 12 September 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Signs of Life on an Exoplanet 120 Million Lightyears Away.


Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18 b | NASA

Abiogenesis, like the conditions that produced the Big Bang, is one of creationism's favourite gaps in which they try to fit their ever-shrinking little god and play their false dichotomy fallacy - if science can't explain it, "God did it!".

That ploy depends for its success of a couple of things, not the least of which are scientific illiteracy and cultural chauvinism of their target dupes. Creationists, while telling their targets that science can't explain how abiogenesis occurred, then pretend they know anyway and have calculated the probability of it. Of course, without knowing the precise conditions and chain of events, it is impossible to do that calculation, but nevertheless, creationist frauds will confidently proclaim it to be infinitesimally small.

However, if the precise mechanism were known, and the conditions could be replicated (temperature, pressure, catalysts, chemicals and time) the mechanism would not be impossible, it would be inevitable (i.e., certainty) since it is a basic principle of chemistry that if the conditions are right, a reaction will occur. No ifs or buts, it will occur since chemical reactions are not governed by laws of probability but by laws of physics. No chemist has ever needed to set up ten thousand test tubes to ensure at least one will produce the expected result. He/she would get ten thousand identical results.

But now, as scientists improve their ability to detect and examine the atmosphere of distant exoplanets orbiting other suns in the galaxy, so they are improving their ability to detect the inevitable signs of life on those planets and many people think it is only a matter of time before we have strong evidence of life elsewhere in the universe.

Saturday 15 April 2023

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?

Friday 7 April 2023

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 Telescope image showing black hole trail of stars
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 area inside white square
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.

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.

Wednesday 19 October 2022

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:

Saturday 3 September 2022

Stunning Images from NASA Courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope

Gravitational lensing
A close up of the JO418 Einstein ring.
Image credit: Spaceguy44
Stunningly perfect 'Einstein ring' captured by James Webb Space Telescope | Live Science

In a departure for this blog, this has little or nothing to do with religion, Creationism or even politics, save only that the reality of the Universe, as shown in this stunning image compiled from data supplied by NASA's James Webb space telescope, bears no relationship to anything described or even hinted at in the Bible.

It is, in fact, an image which confirms Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in that it is produced by gravitational lensing, just as Einstein predicted, back in 1912 when he first announced his discovery. This is the way light can be bent by the gravity of a massive object such as a black hole, a neutron star or, in this case an entire galaxy (SPT-S J041839-4751.8).

Monday 22 March 2021

The Pattern-Recognising Ape - Seeing Things That Aren't What They Seem

A composite image of the USS Jellyfish in Abell 2877 showing the optical Digitised Sky Survey (background) with XMM X-ray data (magenta overlay) and MWA 118 MHz radio data (red-yellow overlay).

Credit: Torrance Hodgson, ICRAR/Curtin University.
Astronomers see a ‘Space Jellyfish’ - ICRAR

In an interesting manifestation of the very human phenomenon of pareidolia (the ability to perceive things which are not really there in patterns) was published by The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) when announcing the findings of an Australian-Italian team using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope to observe a cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2877.

What they 'saw' was a space 'jellyfish'!

Pareidolia is responsible for, for example, the multiple images of Jesus and Mary on toast or in the mess left by a dropped ice-cream. In one case, a chance damp patch on a newly-platered toilet wall in Mali was interpreted as the image of Mohammad at prayer, attracting several high-profile celebrities and politicians to come to see the 'miracle'.

Monday 14 September 2020

Terrible News for Creationists - Signs of Life on Another Planet

Venus in real colors, processed from Mariner 10 images.
Image credit: Mattias Malmer / NASA.
Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus | Nature Astronomy

Creationists have been putting all their eggs in one basket and telling their credulous dupes that the possibility of living organisms arising by natural processes on Earth are so low as to be impossible - so they should conclude that it must have been created by the Christian god exactly as the Bible says.

Now it seems their egg basket may have been kicked over by science. Leaving aside the false dichotomy fallacy in their non sequitur of an argument, the discovery that there may be life in the atmosphere of Venus blows their big scary number tactic out of the water. If it could have happened on Venus it could happen on Earth.

And they still face the prospect of signs of life, either now or in the past, in the soil of Mars and maybe in the waters on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn!

Thursday 5 January 2017

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.

Thursday 8 December 2016

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.

Sunday 29 May 2016

Habitable Planets Are Probably Commonplace.

Kepler-62f (Artist's impression).
A planet in the 'habitable zone' of a star located about 1,200 light-years from Earth.

Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
A planet 1,200 light-years away is a good prospect for a habitable world: Researchers combine climate, orbit models to show that Kepler-62f might be able to sustain life -- ScienceDaily.

News that astronomers have identified yet another possibly habitable planet raises a number of questions for religion, especially the Abrahamic religions, and even more so for creationist fundamentalism based on a literal reading of the Bible or Qur'an.

Both these books portray a Universe created especially for Earth-bound human beings and a creator god who has, or wants, a close relationship with these specially-created Earthlings. Both Christianity and Islam insist that their god created humans simply to worship it. The entire Universe is supposedly here for somewhere for humans to live as they worship this creator god.

Tuesday 14 July 2015

So Farewell Then 'Pillars of Creation'


A higher-resolution HST image of the Pillars of Creation, taken in 2014 as a tribute to the original photograph
Slightly sad news today that the iconic 'Pillars of Creation' are no more, blown away in a massive supernova explosion in the star nursery, the Eagle Nebula.

The 'Pillars of Creation', a formation of gas and dust first photographed in 1995 by the Hubble space telescope quickly became one of the top ten deep space images. They were so named because they are (or were) the early stages of star formation, being condensing gas and dust clouds which would normally collapse to form stars. The taller pillar is a mere five light-years tall.

The Eagle Nebula is 7,000 light-years from Earth which means that the image we see was as it was 7,000 years ago - a bit of a problem for creationists who like to imagine the Universe is only 6,000 years old.

This was discovered by a team from l'Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, Orsay, France who used an infrared image of the region taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, which revealed a hitherto unseen cloud of hot gas advancing on the pillars. They presented their findings last Thursday to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, USA.
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