Extra-Solar Planets and Creationists' Expectations

Exoplanets (extra-solar planets) are simply planets outside our own solar system. The first confirmed exoplanets were discovered around a pulsar in 1992 by radio astronomers, but we don't know a great deal about them. In 1995, the first exoplanet around a star similar to the sun, 51 Pegasi b, was discovered. It's a big one, half the size of Jupiter, which is the largest planet in our own neck of the woods, so to speak. Getting any indication of their existence is difficult, and any pictures are the result of imagination, not observation. Still, astronomers have put notches on their collective belts for over 3,000 of the things. Probably quite a few more out there.

51 Pegasi b credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Why all the hubbub? Since it is impossible for life to form on Earth, use your Charles Darwin Club Secret Decoder Ring© and discover that life must have evolved out yonder and come here one way or another. That just pawns off the problem and gets into the problem of infinite regression, but let's set that aside for now.

It's reasonable to expect that, if we get good views of exoplanets and their stars, they will have some of the quirks we see around us. After all, secular theories of solar system formation do not hold together, as evidenced by youthful action of various objects, the retrograde rotation of Uranus and Venus (those mavericks go opposite everyone else), magnetic fields such as creationist Dr. Russell Humphreys predicted in our own solar system, and more observations that startle devotees of evolutionary cosmology. (Know why your predictions don't work, gang? You have the wrong starting point. The universe was created, and created recently.) We can expect to see evidence of recent creation in exoplanets. The article linked below tells us some of the ways that exoplanets are detected, as well as more details on what creationists can expect.

In the last two decades, astronomers have discovered over 3,000 planets orbiting other stars. These are called extra-solar planets, or exo-planets, and they’ve caused a lot of excitement and speculation. What do we really know about these distant planets, and what is their significance for biblical creation?

Astronomers long suspected that stars might have orbiting planets just as the sun does. However, it’s nearly impossible to observe something as small and faint as an exo-planet next to the bright glare of its host star. So, astronomers have relied primarily on indirect methods of discovery.

You can read the rest of this article by clicking on "Exploring Exo-planets".
 

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