Planets baffle big bangers
NASA launched Kepler, a space telescope designed to search for planets outside the Solar System, called exoplanets, in 2009. Using Kepler, astronomers have so far found 3,538 possible planets. (A smaller number have been verified.)
Commenting on a meeting of astronomers about exoplanets, The Economist said,
“Although the search for Earthlike planets gets most of the limelight, Kepler’s data are useful for other things, too. They have, for instance, driven an empirical coach and horses through astronomers’ ideas about how planets form, by finding all sorts of objects that should not, according to the old theories, exist at all—such as planets the size of Jupiter or bigger orbiting close to their parent stars. Building a new theory to account for these space oddities is a big project.”
Planet formation theory (part of big bang astronomy) was already in serious trouble, because it cannot account for our own solar system, but this adds to the angst of those who want to explain creation without a Creator. (See also Creation 33(1):45–47, 2011; creation.com/extrasolar2.)
- My God, it’s full of planets! The Economist , 9 November 2013, p. 82.
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