Sal Cordova and Aging Galaxies

Woohoo! You just won my favor and support…!!!

They are not on average. Conventional cosmology predicts that statistically, galaxies faraway are different from galaxies close by. There was never the claim that there could be no outliers e.g. faraway galaxies that are much more massive than the average for their age.

In any case, there are thousands of papers describing the differences of galaxies close-by and galaxies far away. I gave three examples in this thread, reproduced here:

  1. The morphology of nearby galaxies are on average different from faraway galaxies ([astro-ph/0109358] The Morphological Evolution of Galaxies )
  2. The velocity dispersion of nearby galaxies are on average different from faraway galaxies ([1107.0972] Redshift Evolution of the Galaxy Velocity Dispersion Function )
  3. The star formation rate of nearby galaxies are on average different from faraway galaxies ([1207.6105] The Average Star Formation Histories of Galaxies in Dark Matter Halos from z=0-8 )

Not only galaxies, but observations of the Lyman-alpha forest shows that the entire universe evolves from being cold and neutral to being hot and ionized due to there being more stars and black holes once the universe is older.

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Thanks a million for that data point!

That was very very helpful and informative.

There is a lone as astronomer who taught at a secular university (University South Carolina), Danny Faulkner, who is also a YEC.

Jason Lisle is and atmospheric physics, Faulkner is a real astronomer and taught astronomy at a secular university until he retired and worked for Answers in Genesis.

I never bothered to look up what Faulkner had to say about what you just mentioned. I talked to him in passing about when I saw him at a Creation Astronomy conference in 2013, and I wish he pointed out to me what you just pointed out!!!

Thanks again.

His PhD work is in solar physics, which is firmly astronomy. His degree was in astrophysics. I don’t know what he does now, but he still identifies as an astrophysicist in his blog.

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I stand corrected. Jason is director of research at the Institute of Creation Research. I ran into him at ICC 2008, ICC 2013, ICC 2018. He’s a real real quiet soft spoken guy. I can hardly get him to say more than a couple words! Not very talkative at all, but very nice, albeit EXTREMELY introverted.

I really appreciate you taking time to read and comment on what I right regarding physics. I have one of Chadrasekhar’s books as a supplemental reference for my old astrophysics class. I couldn’t understand 1% of the math in it. So you most certainly have my admiration for what you’ve attained as a scholar.

My physics background is as an re-treaded engineer getting some familiarity with the terminology. There are a lot of engineers working at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics lab, and they offered physics courses for them since they worked on Space probes and systems, but they weren’t really physicists like you. That’s the sort of coursework I studied which has nowhere near the depth you’ve gone into.

Anyway, all this to say, I appreciate your time and comments.

EDIT:
I think this was the book by Chandrasekhar that got filed away somewhere in my house:

An old universe seems to be churning on and clogging up the works for us biblical creationists. There must come a point we do something about that. And if we cannot explain it in terms of profound youth, then we are going to have to accept what is out there and discover and admit where we have missed something in the Genesis text…We have a problem.

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Done.

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There are some fundamental issues. The first is the red-shift, and next is the microwave background radiation.

The issue of redshift is also complicated. Ned Wright makes a powerful case that the observed Supernova life-span agrees well with time dilation as predicted by red-shift. This was a devastating critique of tired-light and other alternative explanations of red shift. So, that is a major plus for the Big Bang model.

But then there are Quasi-Stellar objects, the Quasars. Quasars are problematic in everyone’s cosmology. Hilton Ratcliffe points out:

3.2. Quasars. In 1963 Alan Sandage and Thomas Matthews, in a landmark fusion of optical and radio astronomy, identified Quasi-Stellar Objects (QSOs, hereafter quasars). They were properly described in terms of their spectral signature, and presented an unusual defining characteristic: Redshifts significantly higher than other objects seen on the sky. This created difficulties for physical theory because at their redshift-implied remoteness, they would, by known physics, be almost impossibly bright.

Quasars are very compact objects, typically only ~1 LY across. If they really are at their redshift distance, they would be so energetic that their luminosity becomes quite extraordinary.

If one plots quasars’ redshift against apparent brightness, as Hubble did for galaxies, one gets a wide scatter, as compared with a smooth curve for the same plot done for galaxies. This seems to indicate that quasars do not follow the Hubble law, and there is no direct indication that they are at their proposed redshift distance. In fact, if Hubble had been given the plot for quasars first, he and other astronomers probably would not have concluded the Universe was expanding.

Furthermore, the calculated charge density of quasars is in some cases so high that it would appear that photons could not likely escape the interior. This means that quasars should be radio- and X-ray-quiet. They obviously are not. Even more onerous was the precision measurement of radial expansion rate by very long baseline radio interferometry. Quasars appeared to be expanding at up to ten times the speed of light, and this poses obviously serious complications for underlying theory and Einsteinian physics. All of these quandaries about quasars indicate serious problems for theory, given their redshift-implied remoteness. However, these issues would tend to disappear if the objects were in fact closer to our point of observation. It was clear that quasars were peculiar enough to warrant further investigation to establish observationally what they actually were in the scheme of things, and where they might be located in space.

Varshni proposed that the spectral lines are being mis-interpreted as red-shift. He argues laser action in plasmas. Only last year was there are report of such laser action (after a long draught on such papers):

https://earthsky.org/space/ant-nebule-m … r-emission

The European Space Agency said on May 16, 2018 that its Herschel space observatory has observed a rare phenomenon: an unusual natural laser emission beaming from the core of the Ant Nebula. This nebula is a striking double-lobed cloud in space – located in the direction to the southern constellation Norma – and now it’s known to contain one of the few space infrared lasers discovered so far. ESA said the laser light beaming from the nebula suggests the presence of a double star system hidden at the nebula’s heart.

This is Varhni’s website. He must be very very old. I tried to contact him and visit him, but to no avail.

I myself reviewed some of the specific quasars Varshni claimed had proper motion. Varshni relied on Luyten’s work decades ago, and Luyten’s data got incorporated in published atlases. But no one bothered to followup on Luyten’s data. Some people kindly compared photographic plates that Luyten had with data 40 years later and there is no proper motion in these high-Z quasars!

Ratcliffe, Burbidge, and Varshni cite some bad data. That doesn’t however negate their other concerns.

But the worst issue, is the one I pointed out, the potential lack of time dilation in the blink rates of quasars. That one really caught my attention.

This essay (not by a creationist) affected my views on cosmology.

Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale? | American Scientist

Current cosmological theory rests on a disturbingly small number of independent observations

It is true that the modern study of cosmology has taken a turn for the better, if only because astronomers can now build relevant instruments rather than waiting for serendipitous evidence to turn up. On the other hand, to explain some surprising observations, theoreticians have had to create heroic and yet insubstantial notions such as “dark matter” and “dark energy,” which supposedly overwhelm, by a hundred to one, the stuff of the universe we can directly detect. Outsiders are bound to ask whether they should be more impressed by the new observations or more dismayed by the theoretical jinnis that have been conjured up to account for them.

Robert Dicke meanwhile noticed a worrying paradox in the Big Bang model: Opposite sides of the cosmos look very much the same, even though they had never been sufficiently close to equilibrate—indeed they had never been sufficiently close for any kind of information (which is limited to the speed of light) to travel between them. This difficulty was virtually unadmitted until 1981, when Alan Guth suggested a vague conceptual solution called “inflation”: a slow start to expansion, followed by a rapid acceleration.

In the 1930s, Richard Tolman proposed such a test, really good data for which are only now becoming available. Tolman calculated that the surface brightness (the apparent brightness per unit area) of receding galaxies should fall off in a particularly dramatic way with redshift—indeed, so dramatically that those of us building the first cameras for the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1980s were told by cosmologists not to worry about distant galaxies, because we simply wouldn’t see them. Imagine our surprise therefore when every deep Hubble image turned out to have hundreds of apparently distant galaxies scattered all over it (as seen in the in this piece). Contemporary cosmologists mutter about “galaxy evolution,” but the omens do not necessarily look good for the Tolman test of Expansion at high redshift.

and last but not least, my beloved professor of undergraduate QM, James Trefil at GMU/UVA who wrote:

There shouldn’t be galaxies out there at all, and even if there are galaxies, they shouldn’t be grouped together the way they are…The problem of explaining the existence of galaxies has proved to be one of the thorniest in cosmology. By all rights, they just shouldn’t be there, yet there they sit. It’s hard to convey the depth of the frustration that this simple fact induces among scientists.
– James Trefil, “5 reasons galaxies shouldn’t exist”, Dark Side of the Universe

As his student, he autographed my copy of his famous book. :smile:

I know exactly what the problem is … you are only human. :slight_smile:

Maybe something was missed, maybe something was never really there, these are very natural human errors, and it is no more or less a problem than any of us have. I humbly suggest that some problems are being forced on you unnecessarily, and are not the most important problems to resolve. The age of galaxies might be one of those.

Just my two-bits as an agnostic.

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Sal, where do you stand on dating the age of individual stars?

Rich,

I believe the individual stars were created about 6,500 years ago, but I cannot make a good theoretical nor empirical case on the matter.

The difficulty of the problem became apparent when I began studying astrophysics.

I can only offer my views, as a personal intuitive belief. This is in contrast to other statements I will make, like say the age of the fossil record or abiogenesis or eukaryotic evolution.

Space physics, astrophysics, comsology are immensely difficult fields.

What I have written in this thread is to reflect my general sense that all of us collectively are making lots of guesses without sufficient data.

Here is an interesting paper on quasars:

Physical Origins for Variations in the Apparent Positions of Quasars

Abstract—The physical origins of the apparent motion of radio sources in the ICRF are considered. The sources can be divided into four groups, according to the characteristics of their motion. Here, we consider the model for the motion of the first group of sources—those displaying uniform linear motion. Since the
apparent speeds of the radio sources are close to, and sometimes exceeding, the speed of light, it is natural to suppose that these sources are relativistic jets or plasma clouds moving with speeds close to the speed of light.

It has been demonstrated that extragalactic radio sources are not stationary on the celestial sphere, and we have shown that this motion can be explained as
a consequence of precessional motion of the quasar jets. For most reasonable estimates of the precessional speed, the core of the radio source should display linear motion over several hundreds of years.

That said, “the precessional motion” is like waving a flash light. The position of the light spot can move apparently faster than the speed of light, but it is an illusion! But, there is still some problem in having a plasma jet moving close to the speed of light.

OR, maybe redshift doesn’t indicate distance for Quasars. Or as Varshni suggested they aren’t redshifted at all.

When a police radar gun sense a shift when aiming the radar gun at a car, the characteristics of the signal being sent out are well known and can be compared accurately with the signal being received after it is bounced of the target car, and thus inference of shifting is quite valid, and the officer will rightly issue a ticket to the car driver for speeding if the speed limit is violated.

The problem with stellar signals is we actually are guessing what the original signal is and then estimating how much it is shifted. Varshni argues, in the absence of having the reference source signal in hand to make a redshift determination, there is room for misinterpretation! Added to that, if there is lasing action in the plasmas, this adds even more room for misinterpretation.

We really don’t know enough. It’s still early in the game to be making final pronouncements about much of anything in cosmology.

The above and your inference below of a static universe are highly problematic. Give me something - anything - to go on. Offer some kind of plausible idea about how starlight has arrived at our location within 6500 years. I hope I am not putting you on the spot.

I don’t have one, we have to wait on the Lord to find out how. 9 of the 10, if not 10 of the 10 YEC/YCC cosmologies are wrong. No one knows how. Only God, for now, and He will reveal it if He chooses.

Do you have these readily available?

Please see my challenge to Hartnett here

http://www.setterfield.org/Challenge_to_Hartnett.html

See my challenge to Humphreys here

They refused to publish my challenge to Lisle so I published here