Sunny surprise

Another evolutionary notion thrown into disarray by ‘moonwalk’ samples.

by Carl Wieland

‘Cosmic evolution’—which is unfortunately also a part of nearly all long-age (or old-earth) creationist teachings—surmises that the sun and planets slowly condensed out of a spinning cloud of dust and gas over millions of years.

This idea has always had huge problems. But some new, quite easy-to-understand findings on the sun’s composition, reported in Nature,¹ have thrown this notion of solar system evolution into even greater disarray.

^{Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech}

One cannot get samples directly from the sun, but the ‘solar wind’ carries elements from the sun and blasts them into the surface of the moon. So researchers looking for clues as to how the solar system evolved (in their belief system) studied samples of lunar soil brought back by Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon.

To their surprise, the oxygen-16 isotope composition of the sun turns out to be dramatically lower than theory predicted. One of the researchers, Dr Trevor Ireland from the Australian National University, said that the result was ‘completely unexpected’. He added: ‘Our sun is not the sun we thought it was.’ He was being quoted on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, which carried this telling statement:

‘Dr Ireland says the finding also suggests the Sun somehow ended up with a different composition from the cloud of dust and gas that preceded it’.²

Which is of course a major conundrum for the evolutionary ‘nebula’ theory outlined in our first paragraph.

The facts about the sun and moon, as opposed to the continual evolutionary ‘spin’ with which they are interpreted, give no reason to doubt the biblical statement that they were created in much their present form on the 4^th Day of Creation Week, some 6,000 years ago.

References

1. Ireland , T.R., Holden, P., Norman, M.D., and Clark, J., Isotopic enhancements of ¹⁷O and ¹⁸O from solar wind particles in the lunar regolith, Nature 440 (7085):776–778, 6 April 2006. Return to text.
2. Skatssoon, J., Sun research yields unexpected results, ABC Science Online, <www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200604/s1610398.htm>, 7 April 2006. Return to text.