Saturn’s Moon Titan Really Looks Young

 

Image curtesy of: NASA/John Glenn Research Center. fair use doctrine.

Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists assume that Saturn’s moon Titan is millions of years old, so  “uniformitarian scientists speculate that perhaps the methane in Titan’s atmosphere is being continuously replenished via eruptions of cryovolcanoes or slow seepage through the crust. But there is so far no observational evidence for these assumed replenishment processes. ”

However, the science shows that it is not too old, first, they found Tholin on the moon. Laboratory tests have indicated that if this has continued for billions of years there should be much less tholin on Titan than there is. And then there are Methane and Ethane that are dangers for millions of years

Source:

Heber Jake. 2O21, Reminder: Titan Really Looks Young Institute for Creation Research 8 February

Neptune’s Moon Triton Looks Young, Too

Image courtesy of NASA / Jet Propulsion Lab, public domain.



Joel Kontinen

Nowadays, the planets and their moons surrounding the Sun all seem to be very much less than the 4.5 billion years assigned for them on the scale that most scientist use to compute the age of them.

Now, this tendency has also reached Neptune's moon triton. A recent article in Phys.org about the moon says:

“Astronomers using the Gemini Observatory explore Neptune's largest moon Triton and observe, for the first time beyond the lab, an extraordinary union between carbon monoxide and nitrogen ices. The discovery offers insights into how this volatile mixture can transport material across the moon's surface via geysers, trigger seasonal atmospheric changes, and provide a context for conditions on other distant, icy worlds.

Extreme conditions can produce extreme results. In this case, it's the uncommon pairing of two common molecules—carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen (N2)—frozen as solid ices on Neptune's frigid moon Triton.

It is the only large moon in the Solar System that orbits ‘backwards’ or in the opposite direction to its planet's rotation. The peculiar motion suggests that Triton is a captured trans-Neptunian object from the Kuiper Belt—a region of leftovers from the Solar System's early history, which is why it shares several features with the dwarf planet Pluto and Eris: size (roughly two-thirds that of our Moon), and surface temperatures that hover near absolute zero; so low that common compounds we know as gases on Earth freeze into ices.”

The article does not say who old Triton is, but it only states that the two molecules – carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen (N2). – are frozen on the moon.

Even Pluto and Erin and Makemake are also young.

Moreover, a dwarf planet orbiting the sun some 2 billion kilometres beyond Pluto would have a ring that suggests young age.

And, Ultima Thule also looks youthful.

Source:

Gemini Observatory, 2019, Neptune's moon Triton fosters rare icy union. Phys.org. (22 May).

Ceres’ Spots: The Dwarf Planet Is Younger and Geologically More Active than Expected

Much younger than expected. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL.




Joel Kontinen

The evidence against a 4.5 billion-year-old solar system keeps on growing:

It includes Saturn’s rings, Pluto’s atmosphere, oxygen on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, as well as ice on Mercury on the asteroid 24 Themis.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus has enigmatic plumes.

And then there’s Ceres.

The dwarf planet is geologically active though it shouldn’t be in a very old universe.

New research features Ceres’ bright spots. According to New Scientist:

“These spots are telling a story of a younger, more geologically active Ceres than researchers expected. That’s because we would expect material ejected by impacts to mix eventually and create a uniform surface.”

The most logical explanation is that there hasn’t been enough time.

Source:

McKinnon, Mika. 2017. The mysterious bright spots on Ceres may have a common origin. New Scientist (2 October).

The Moon’s Surface Might Be 100 Times Younger Than Previously Thought, Recent Impact Craters Suggest

Here’s one of the recent impact craters. Image courtesy of NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.





Joel Kontinen

The Moon’s origin is a naturalistic mystery. Now it seems that its age is also a dilemma for those who subscribe to billions of years.

In the past 7 years, meteorites have bombarded the Moon far more frequently than scientists previously thought. Recently, Nature published a paper by Emerson Speyerer, at Arizona State University in Tempe, and colleagues.

They compared older and more recent pictures taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and found at least 222 new impact craters.

This has far-reaching consequences. A Nature News article explains:

“Planetary geologists will also need to rethink their understanding of the age of the lunar surface, which depends on counting craters and estimating how long the terrain has been pummelled by impacts.”

On Space.com, Charles Choi brings up more surprises:

“The scientists also found broad zones around these new craters that they interpreted as the remains of jets of debris following impacts. They estimated this secondary cratering process is churning the top 0.8 inches (2 centimeters) of lunar dirt, or regolith, across the entire lunar surface more than 100 times faster than thought.”

" ‘I'm excited by the fact that we can see the regolith evolve and churn — a process that was believed to take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to occur — in images acquired over the past several years,’ Speyerer told Space.com.”

While believers in millions of years still think that only the Moon’s surface is young, they might well be mistaken. Time and again, planetary scientists are surprised at what they see: almost all planets, moons, and comets – and even Saturn’s rings – look a lot younger than they should in a solar system that they believe is “4.6 billion years” old.

Sources:

Choi, Charles Q. 2016. Impact! New Moon Craters Are Appearing Faster Than Thought. Space.com (12 October).

Witze, Alexandra. 2016. Meteorites pummel the Moon far more than expected. Nature News (12 October).

Oxygen on Comet 67P Challenges Belief in Billions of Years

Image courtesy of: ESA.



Joel Kontinen

Belief in a billions-of-years-old solar system is becoming increasingly difficult due to some recent discoveries.

The latest scoop came from oxygen found in Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. According to New Scientist:

“Oxygen is a volatile chemical that shouldn’t stick around for long in space, and the team couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t coming from the spacecraft itself. But after seven months of observing, they were confident that the oxygen had been buried in the comet since its birth about 4.5 billion years ago.”

It is a huge problem for a worldview not based on Genesis. As yet, no one has figured out a plausible explanation.

And we should not forget that there are many other signs of youth on planets, moons, dwarf planets and even asteroids.


Source:

Sokol, Joshua. 2015. Rosetta’s comet has oxygen made before the solar system’s birth. New Scientist 3045 (31 October).

Global Ocean on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Challenges Billions of Years Dogma

Enceladus does not look old. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.



Joel Kontinen

The solar system does not look as old (4.5 billion years) as it is assumed to be. Time and again, scientists are surprised to find signs of youth.

One such discovery was that of a subterranean global ocean on Enceladus, a moon that probably has geysers:

“Beneath an icy crust, Saturn's moon Enceladus … has an ocean that covers its entire globe. NASA's Cassini spacecraft measured wobbles in Enceladus's rotation over more than seven years. The data confirm that the crust is moving separately from the rocky core, meaning that there must be a widespread layer of liquid between them, says a team led by Peter Thomas of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.”

This is yet another discovery that challenges the billions-of-years dogma.


Source:

Global ocean on Enceladus. Nature 525, 428 (24 September 2015).

Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Defies Belief in Billions of Years

Enceladus puzzles old-agers. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.





Joel Kontinen

Many planets and moons in our solar system look far too young to be as old as the current secular consensus would assert, i.e. 4.5 billion years.

Researchers suspect that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has an underground ocean. Without it, the moon could hardly be as old as they believe it is.

A brief article in Science states:

“A watery layer beneath Enceladus’s crust has long been suspected to exist because of the constant eruption of geysers at its southern pole. But scientists have said that any such ocean should have frozen over the lifetime of the Saturn system.”

It’s a huge problem for the belief in billions of years. Researchers have attempted to solve the dilemma by suggesting that Enceladus may have a “rubble-filled pile of boulders and ice at its core, rather than a more conventional solid stone center.”

Some of the attempts used in bolstering up faith in an old solar system are beginning to sound like the epicycles that were used to explain the movements of the planets in the ancient Ptolemaic (geocentric) system.

Planets were assumed to move around in tiny circles as they orbited the Earth. This could explain some of the observations but not all and eventually the geocentric model was discarded.

It seems that faith in a billions-of-years-old solar system also needs epicycles, as the facts do not otherwise support the theory.

Many planets, moons and even asteroids look far too young, for instance Mercury, Venus, the dwarf planet Ceres, Saturn and its moons Titan and Mimas, Jupiter’s moons Io and Europa, Pluto and its moon Charon and even the asteroid 24 Themis.


Source:

Redd, Nola Taylor. Saturn’s moon has a fluffy heart. ScienceShot (21 August).

When Earth became 120 million years younger

This planet is much younger than astronomers assumed. Image courtesy of NASA.



Joel Kontinen

Did you notice that Earth just lost 120 million years of its age? Even if you haven’t, the implications of a recent study should probably cause us to take a more critical approach to the idea of millions of years of Earth history.

Nikolai Gogol’s character Chichikov collected names of the deceased in Dead Souls into lists of the living. In like manner, later-day astronomers have included non-existent years into their model.

It seems that they have already collected too much of them.

Recently, Tais W. Dahl of the University of Copenhagen and David J. Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) defined the ages of Earth and the Moon with the help of tungsten isotopes and published their research in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Dahl and Stevenson decided to cut off 120 million years from the age of Earth after examining the elements in its mantle.

According to ScienceDaily,

”The age of Earth and the Moon can be dated by examining the presence of certain elements in Earth's mantle. Hafnium-182 is a radioactive substance, which decays and is converted into the isotope tungsten-182. The two elements have markedly different chemical properties and while the tungsten isotopes prefer to bond with metal, hafnium prefers to bond to silicates, i.e. rock.”

Dahl and Stevenson suggest that Earth and the Moon were formed "only" 150 million years after the origin of the solar system. It was previously assumed that the age difference was 30 millions years.

It seems that the world is becoming younger and younger.

However, even the latest estimate does not take into account the Creator who could make everything much faster.

Source:

Earth and Moon Formed Later Than Previously Thought, New Research Suggests. ScienceDaily 9 June 2010.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100607111310.htm

Ice on the surface of an asteroid: the astronomers’ coelacanth?

Using NASA’s infrared telescope on Mauna Kea, astronomers found surface water ice on an asteroid. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

What does the coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae have in common with surface ice on an asteroid called 24 Themis? According to an article in Nature, both are relics of the past and should no longer exist.

The coelacanth is a living fossil. The first live Latimeria chalumnae was found in 1938. The surface ice on 24 Themis was discovered much later.

Recently, Nature published two letters on the surface ice of the asteroid. 24 Themis orbits the Sun at about 3.2 astronomical units (AU) from it in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (1 AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun.)

There is still surprisingly much water ice on the surface of 24 Themis. However, astronomers who believe in billions of years would not expect ice to remain on the relatively warm surface of an asteroid so they have had to think hard to find explanations for this ”anomaly”, such as (a) ice continually rises to the surface from deeper in the asteroid or (b) impacts with other asteroids keep the surface covered by ice.

A much more logical explanation would be to acknowledge that 24 Themis is not billions of years old. Like comets, Saturn’s moon Titan and Mercury’s magnetic field, 24 Themis speaks of a young solar system.


Sources:

Campins, Humberto & al. 2010. Water ice and organics on the surface of the asteroid 24 Themis. Nature 464:7293, 1320-1321 (29 April).

Hsieh, Henry H. 2010. A Frosty Finding. Nature 464:7293, 1286-1287 (29 April).

Rivkin, Andrew S. and Joshua P. Emery. Detection of ice and organics on an asteroid surface. Nature 464:7293, 1322-1323 (29 April).

Tholin on Titan: Indicator of young age

Image courtesy of NASA.





Joel Kontinen

Saturn’s moon Titan is an enticingly mysterious world. The Huygens probe landed on Titan in January 2005 and has since then sent images and other data about the moon. A research team at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland led by Ralph Lorenz has examined the images and drawn their conclusions about the data. Recently they published their findings in Geophysical Research Letters.

Titan’s surface is covered with lakes made up not of water but of liquid methane and ethane. The surface temperature of this big moon is approximately -178 °C, keeping the methane liquid though some of it condenses and forms clouds as it cools in the atmosphere. Thus the rain on Titan is liquid methane.

The solid surface of Titan is covered by dynes of a substance resembling sand. The dynes are made up of tholin that is composed of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen.

Tholin has been named after the Greek word for ’muddy’. It is formed as sunlight splits the methane molecules apart and the atoms combine to form larger molecules. Laboratory tests have indicated that if this has continued for billions of years there should be much less tholin on Titan than there is. The researchers concluded that Titan’s present methanological cycle cannot have continued so long but must have begun much later.

Lorenz believes that earth’s hydrological cycle began early in the history of our planet but he suspects that Titan’s methanological cycle must be relatively young.

Although not all astronomers are willing to discard the idea of a 4.6 billion year old solar system, Titan’s tholin speaks for a much younger moon than was supposed.

The next step would be to admit that the entire solar system is only 6000 years old.

Source:

Ball, Philip. 2008. Titanic climate change in store. Nature News 6.2. 2008. http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080206/full/news.2008.553.html

You can read about more evidence for a younger solar system here.

Comets - The Ugly Ducklings of a Young Solar System

Image: Wikipedia





Joel Kontinen

Hans Christian Andersen (1807-1875) wrote a fascinating tale about a swan that was born on a farmyard and thought it was a duck. The other ducks despised this ugly brown bird and chased it away. One day, however, Ugly Duckling saw some big white birds swimming in a pond. It expected them to drive it out, but they did not. Then the bird looked into the water and saw the reflection of itself: it was not a duckling after all but a beautiful white bird like the others, a swan.

Most of the time comets are like Ugly Duckling. The comet’s nucleus is a small dirty rock usually 1-10 kilometers in diameter consisting of ice, gas and dust. In some comets, this nucleus is surrounded by a huge hydrogen cloud, which may be up to 3 million kilometers wide. [1]

As the comet comes near the sun, a dramatic metamorphosis seems to take place: The sun’s heat “vaporizes some of the icy nucleus or head and sunlight reflects from the vapor. Solar wind pushes the vapor in a direction away from the Sun to form the comet's tail. For this reason, comet tails generally point away from the Sun.”[2]

Comets can be roughly divided into two categories: long-term comets, which orbit the sun in more than 200 years, and short-term comets, with an orbital period of 200 years or less. Some of them are so spectacular that they were though to augur doom. For instance, in 1066 Halley’s Comet preceded the Battle of Hastings, in which William the Conqueror defeated England’s Saxon king Harold.[3]

Many comets have elliptical paths that bring them very close to the sun. A comet loses much of its material each time it approaches the sun.[4] It has been estimated that a comet will loose all its mass in under 100 000 years.[5] This is a serious problem for the secular view of a 4.6 billion year old solar system. If the solar system were that old, we should not see any comets.

But this has not caused believers in million of years to discard their theory. They have set their hopes on a hypothetical stretch of space called the Oort Cloud.[6] They believe that this spherical “cloud”, which is supposed to extend up to three light years from the sun,[7] houses millions of frozen comets that eventually find their way into an orbit that brings them closer to the sun to replace the ones that have been destroyed.[8] The Oort Cloud is thought to provide long-term comets. The biggest problem with this explanation is there is no observational evidence for the existence of this cloud.[9] Creationist astronomer Dr. Danny Faulkner suggests that the whole idea of the Oort Cloud “is not bad science, but non-science masquerading as science. The existence of comets is good evidence that the solar system is only a few thousand years old.”[10].

The Kuiper Belt has been proposed as a potential reservoir for short-term comets. It extends from Neptune’s orbit (ca 30 astronomical units or AUs[11]) to about 50 AU from the sun.[12] However, most of the objects in this area which lies beyond Neptune’s orbit, are tens of times bigger than comets.[13] These so-called Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) include the recently discovered Eris (2003UB313) and Sedna (90377), which might be classified as dwarf planets. However, when compared to comets, they are giants. In order to replenish the comet supply, there should be millions of them but only 1026 TNOs have been found.[14]

There is not enough material in either the Oort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt to supply the solar system with the number of comets that old earth supporters desperately need. Genesis 1:14-19 records that the heavenly bodies we see in the night sky were created on Day Four. The genealogies of the Bible indicate that this occurred about 6000 years ago.

The Ugly Ducklings of the solar system are not portents of doom. The message they bring is altogether different. Together with other celestial objects they “declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19: 1). They are amazing evidences for a young solar system.


1] Anatomy of A Comet. http://www.nasm.si.edu/ceps/etp/comets/comet_anatomy.html
[2] Ref 1.
[3] Sarfati, Jonathan. 2003. Comets: Portents of Doom or Indicators of Youth? Creation 25:3, 36-40, June 2003. http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/141.
[4] The loss can be tremendous. For instance, “More than 1000 tons of this dust escaped from the head of comet C/1973 El (Kohoutek) every second, and formed a ‘dust tail’ ". Ref. 1
[5] Lisle, Jason. 2005. What Does the Bible Say about Astronomy? Answers in Genesis booklet.
[6] Faulkner, Danny. 2001. More problems for the ‘Oort comet cloud’. TJ 15:2, 11, August 2001.
[7] Ref. 3.
[8] The gravitational impact of other stars is occassionally thought to disturb these sleeping comets and knock them into orbits closer to the sun. (Faulkner, Danny 1997. Comets and the Age of the Solar System. Technical Journal 11:364–273, December 1997).
[9] While some astronomers have suggested that the dwarf planet Sedna, discovered in 2003, is too far from the sun to be a Kuiper Belt Object, they argue that it is actually the first object to be discovered in the Oort Cloud. (Wikipedia. 90377 Sedna. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90377_Sedna). But Sedna comes to within 76 Astronomical Units from the sun, so such a classification would involve stretching definitions quite a bit since Oort Cloud objects were not expected to be so “close” to the sun.
[10] Ref. 6.
[11] One Astronomical Unit (AU) is the average distance from the Earth to the sun or approximately 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles.
[12] Kenyon, Scott J and Benjamin C. Bromley. 2004. Stellar encounters as the origin of distant Solar System objects in highly eccentric orbits. Nature 432, 598-602 (2 December 2004). http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v432/n7017/abs/nature03136.html
[13] “The biggest surprise of the Hubble search is that so few small Kuiper Belt members were discovered. With Hubble's exquisite resolution, Bernstein and his co-workers expected to find at least 60 Kuiper Belt members as small as 10 miles (15 km) in diameter — but only three were found.” (Farthest, Faintest Solar System Objects Found Beyond Neptune News Release Number: STScI-2003-2. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2003/25).
[14] They include Pluto and its three moons. See http://www.boulder.swri.edu/ekonews/issues/past/n050/ekonews050.pdf.

For more evidence for a young solar system, read here.