This article is from
Creation 27(3):7, June 2005

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Saturnian surprises

New discoveries unearthed by the Cassini-Huygens space mission to Saturn continue to challenge evolutionary cosmologists.

image: NASA

For example, Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has long been known to have an atmosphere, but its composition puzzles long-age cosmologists. The sun’s UV radiation breaks down methane (CH₄), and the hydrogen would escape Titan’s weak gravity. In fact, methane should last only for about 10,000 years. And a major by-product should be an ocean of liquid ethane hundreds of metres thick. Yet Titan still has methane clouds, while large areas of liquid ethane are nowhere to be found.

Also, Cassini found two more moons orbiting Saturn. However, they are ‘a surprise because such small bodies, just 3 or 4 kilometres across, should have been obliterated long ago by collisions with comets’.

• The missing methane, Astrobiology Magazine, web.archive.org/web/20111112090325/astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_retrospection&task=detail&id=1478, 17 March 2005.
• New Scientist, 21 August 2004, p. 5; 20 November 2004, p. 9.

Although the evidence is obviously consistent with a young (6,000-year-old) universe, evolutionists are committed to billions of years. So they try to explain away the data, e.g. by postulating methane sources. Why? Perhaps because without long periods of time, evolutionary theories collapse!