Around the World with Ken Ham

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What Do They Really See? Posted: 20 Aug 2012 07:04 AM PDT Someone brought a recent article on the Fox News website to my attention. The article begins with the following: Scientists have found a cosmic supermom. It’s a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year. Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant gigantic galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year. The galaxy is about 5.7 billion light years away in the center of a recently discovered cluster of galaxies that give off the brightest X-ray glow astronomers have seen. It is by far the biggest creation of stars that astronomers have seen for this kind of galaxy. Other types, such as colliding galaxies, can produce even more stars, astronomers said. But the Bible says that at the end of the sixth day of creation, God “finished” his work of Creation. So is star formation continuing? Do they really see stars forming? We asked a creationist astronomer about this article. He explained that at the distance of this galaxy, individual stars are not visible. The conclusion that there is large star birth here, he told us, is an inference that is laden with evolutionary assumptions. Very bright, hot, blue stars have short lifetimes compared to the billions of years normally assumed. This conclusion is based on the amount of power that these stars radiate, and it is independent of any particular source of energy. The PhD astronomer also stated that when a galaxy such as this appears very blue, it likely is because the galaxy’s light is dominated by these bright, hot stars with very short lifetimes. So in a billions-of-years scenario, evolutionists believe that these stars must have formed very recently and that star formation likely is still going on. This to them suggests a much higher-than-normal star birth rate, hence the claim of a “star burst.” He concluded by telling us that such discoveries of star burst galaxies have been claimed for some time. Two things make this recent claim unique, he said. First, it suggests a much greater rate of star birth than previously claimed. Second, this galaxy appears to be at the center of a cluster of galaxies. Hence it is assumed to be the dominant galaxy in the cluster. Dominant central galaxies tend to be redder and are thus assumed to be older than the other galaxies in their respective clusters. The bottom line is that astronomers do not see stars forming. This is an interpretation based on evolutionary assumptions. Isn’t it sad how news reports like this indoctrinate people to believe something that hasn’t been observed? In a few days, we will present a more thorough analysis of this claim on the AiG website. You can read the article online at Fox News. Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying, Ken