Stars and galaxies
Creation for Kids: Twinkling stars
Published in Creation 42(3):32–35, 2020
In Genesis 15:5, God told Abraham to look up and count the stars, if he could. He was really making the point to Abraham that his descendants would be more than he could count—just like the stars. Until modern days we didn’t realize how many more stars there were than we can count, but in 1995, astronomers took a powerful telescope and aimed it at a tiny point in the sky. They magnified the image from the telescope and that picture is called the Hubble Deep Field. They found that there are galaxies as far out as we can see, and probably much farther. There are around 100 billion galaxies visible with that instrument, each with around 100 billion stars on average!
Why so many stars?
The Bible tells us that God created the stars on Day 4 of Creation Week. Many ancient people thought that they were for telling the future, but God tells us in Genesis why He created them: to help us tell time and the seasons (Genesis 1:14–18). He also created the stars to show how powerful and big He is; even though there are more than we can count, it wasn’t hard for Him (Genesis 1:16). We can’t even count the stars, but the Bible says God knows each by name (Psalm 147:4).
Huge variety of stars
The Apostle Paul wrote, “star differs from star in glory” (1 Corinthians 15:41). Stars are very different from each other.
The star we’re most familiar with is our sun, which is a type of star called a yellow dwarf. (Its true colour is white, but the scattering of light by the atmosphere can make it look yellow.)
Stars big and small
Most stars are much smaller than the sun, but some are much larger.
The smallest and lightest stars, called red dwarfs, are only a tenth as massive as the sun and can’t be seen without a telescope. The closest star to us (apart from the sun) is a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri, 4.3 light years away. Red giants are stars that are much bigger and brighter than the sun, although they are not as hot. The biggest, called red ‘hypergiants’, are about 2,600 times wider than the sun (such as VY Canis Majoris, below).
The heaviest, blue hypergiants, are over 100 times as massive as the sun. One blue hypergiant called R136a1 (above) is really huge. It is about 43 times the diameter of our sun, about 200 times more massive, and shines 5 million times brighter. R136a1is 163,000 light years from Earth. If it were as close to us as Proxima Centauri is, it would appear as bright as the full moon.
Incredibly dense stars
White dwarfs are super-dense, which means that a tiny amount weighs a lot—a teaspoon of white dwarf star would weigh about as much as an elephant!
Neutron stars are far denser still. A teaspoon of neutron star matter would weigh as much as 900 Great Pyramids! They often rotate very fast, emitting pulses of energy, so are called pulsars.
Black holes are even denser than neutron stars. This means that anything that gets close to a black hole gets sucked in by its powerful gravity—even light! We can tell where black holes are because of the things that are attracted to them.
Stars could not have existed without God!
Evolutionists believe that stars formed from collapsing clouds of dust and gas. But gas expands, as is well known. Thus they claim that an exploding star caused the collapse. But then where did that star come from, and where could the first stars have come from? Stars could not have formed unless God created them.
Readers’ comments
Comments are automatically closed 14 days after publication.