Reading, Writing, and Reflecting

Steve Willis

Blue Moon

"Scientists got a surprise when they compared a new ultra-violet image of the Moon with the one taken in visible light: the lunar surface looks pretty much the same in both images. Compared to visible images, lunar UV images are more sensitive to rock freshness and should highlight the regions that were resurfaced by impacts during the last 1 to 2 billion years.

"Based on lab tests of Apollo samples, the scientists expected the UV image to be essentially a negative of the visible one. `That the Moon does not appear reversed in the UV is quite a mystery,' says Randy Gladstone, head of the team that made the study. `We have our work cut out to explain it.' Gladstone is at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas; the UV images were taken by Endeavour's Astro-2 payload in March 1995."

Comment

It seems to me they expected to see most of the Moon's surface to be one color where it was old, and that it should have appeared the opposite where it was new. By "old" they would have meant 4-4.5 billion years, and by "new" or resurfaced, they would have said less than 2 billion years. In fact, if the UV theory is right, what is old looks new and what is new looks old. These type of mysteries have been in abundance of late.

Now under "The Quasar Epoch" these quotes, not in their entirety:

"A new quasar survey has found that these distant cosmic powerhouses did not flicker on randomly. Instead, almost all quasars appear to have lit up at roughly the same time, which may tell astronomers when the first galaxies started to form."

Again don't think scientists are agreeing to a young-universe as many creation researchers maintain. They say this about the quasar epoch: "The quasar epoch must have lasted from red shift 2.7 to 1.7, which corresponds roughly to 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang" (both reports on page 30). The question would be "Why did they all turn on all at once?"

But it gives one another thing to think about when he reads Genesis 1:3, "`Let there be light,' and there was light."

If you've been following some of the Age-of-the-Universe reports based on the recent Hubble telescope finds, you've seen that there is a crisis going on. Researchers are finding the universe to be younger than some of the stars in it. This fits neither the Bible view, nor the Big Bang cosmologies. While thinking they see stars that they would measure as 15-20 billion years old, earlier in 1995, the universe was only dating from 8-11 billion years old. Figuring something was wrong, they, turned the Hubble telescope to another part of the universe to try to measure an expansion rate that they would use to figure the age of the universe. Here are their findings:

"Plugging their values into the Einstein-de Sitter model of the universe, associates get an age of 9.5 billion years since the Big Bang. Because stellar astronomers claim to have measured stars as old as 15 billion years, this paradox between extragalactic and galactic methods of fixing the universe's age still stands (from Astronomy, January, 1996)"

All I'm trying to relate with this information is that creationists aren't the only ones grappling with the "facts"so are other scientists. The creationist has the advantage of believing God's word that says GOD created the heavens and the earth, and when He did so it was mature and probably mature looking.

Guardian of Truth XL: 5 p. 23
March 7, 1996