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Free Science e-Newsletter,
April 2006 |
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From the Editor - Steve Walden |
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Planetary Distance Project - Jeannie Fulbright |
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Mercury - The Tiny Planet That Causes Big Problems for Evolution - Spike
Psarris for Answers in Genesis |
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In 2004, President
Bush gave a speech about going back to the moon and
building a permanent colony. From there, we would be able
to launch missions to Mars. While some take a skeptical
stance on these speeches, even the staunchest critics
would have to agree that the possibility exists for future
interplanetary travel.
While there are specific challenges that must be conquered, such as ship design
and construction, an even more daunting prospect is the distance. Although it
is the next planet out from the sun, it isn't just down the street. It is millions
of miles away - much farther than we have gone with any manned exploration of
our solar system.
This month, Jeannie Fulbright has a project to approximate the distance of
each planet from our sun. A quick trip to the office supply store is recommended,
since you'll need one or two boxes of paper clips. This project will help your
grade-schoolers understand the concept of interplanetary distances based on scale.
Also this month, Spike Psarris writes about the planet Mercury and how troublesome
it is for evolutionists to explain Mercury's density and its magnetic field. It
will take more than a few planetary collisions to straighten it out, but Psarris
will shed some light on the problems of the popular evolutionary theory of nebulous
formation of our solar system. According to NASA, the Messenger probe, launched
in 2004, will fly by Mercury three times during 2008 and 2009 before finally achieving
an orbit in 2011. Messenger should orbit Mercury for a year while mapping Mercury's
surface and studying its composition, interior structure, and magnetic field.
It will be interesting to see what more is discovered about this planet in the
next five years.
Our solar system is truly a work of delicate balance
as well as beauty. Take some time to explore our solar
system with your children. Go find a planetarium, a telescope,
or even a simple star chart and a cloudless night. Take
a star walk with your children and talk with them about
the planets, asteroids, comets, and stars. Talk with
them about their Creator. While you may not go to a different
planet anytime soon, you will open up new worlds to your
child.
Steve Walden
Senior Editor, Free Science e-Newsletter
Steve Walden lives in Colorado and, together with
his wife, homeschools their three children, ages 9, 6, and 2. He is a freelance
writer and editor with articles appearing in Focus On Your Child: Discovery
Years and Fatherville. When he's not blogging at Dad's
Corner on Homeschool Blogger, he's searching for new opportunities to write
about homeschooling, parenting, and connecting with God. His dream is to operate
a retreat center in Colorado for pastors and families in ministry.
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By Jeannie Fulbright
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Have you ever wondered how far Earth is from, say, Pluto? Perhaps you wanted
to explain to your children how large our solar system is but couldn't find words
to describe the vastness of it. Well, here's a little activity that will
really bring those concepts down to size.
You are going to need two boxes of 500 paper clips (or one box of 1,000) and
something to represent each planet, such as marbles. Remind the children that
this is not a scale model of the comparative size of each planet;
it's a model of how far each planet is from the sun and from
the other planets. Incidentally, the first lesson in Exploring
Creation with Astronomy has an activity to make a model of the comparative
sizes of the planets.
To do this project, you will need a large space. Outdoors would probably be
the best option. If you have a long hallway, that will work as well. Choose one
object, such as a large ball, to represent the sun. You will then begin hooking
paperclips together, according to the chart below, and place them in a straight
line from the sun. Each paperclip will represent about 10 million miles. At the
end of the paperclip line you will place the planet. You will be making nine paperclip
lines, one line for each planet. If you don't have large family, invite a group
of homeschoolers come to do this with you. After a while, it can get rather tiresome
to hook all those paperclips together.
Here are the distances and number of paperclips to hook
together for each planet:
Mercury 36 million miles from the sun
4 paperclips from the sun
Venus 67 million miles from the sun
7 paperclips from the sun
Earth 93 million miles from the sun
9 paperclips from the sun
Mars 142 million miles from the sun
14 paperclips from the sun
Jupiter 484 million miles from the sun
48 paperclips from the sun
Saturn 885 million miles from the sun
89 paperclips from the sun
Uranus 1,781 million miles from the sun
178 paperclips from the sun
Neptune 2793 million miles from the sun
279 paperclips from the sun
Pluto 3660 million miles from the sun
366 paperclips from the sun
It's important to note that although considered the ninth planet, Pluto is
sometimes inside Neptune's orbit, making Neptune the furthest planet from the
sun.
After doing this activity, explain to your children that our solar system represents
only a small piece of the universe - just our little world and its solar system.
Look out into the night sky and imagine that every single star out there in the
universe represents another solar system. Objects, whether they are other stars,
planets, or comets, circle around each of those stars you see. The stars we are
able to see are only a small sprinkling of the stars in the sky. There are billions
and billions and billions of stars that we can't even see without a powerful telescope.
The universe is so immense and enormous that our minds cannot even conceive of
its actual size. Yet One can, our God who created it all, and has actually taken
the time to name each and every one of the multiple billions of stars in the sky.
If God would care to do such a thing, how much more does He care about you? Even
though we are tiny and seem insignificant in comparison to this huge Earth, He
thinks about you constantly and thought about you even before He made one of the
stars in the sky.
How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God!
How great is the sum of them! If I should count
them, they are more in number than the sand. Psalm
139: 17-18
According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation
of the world, that we should be holy and without blame
before him in love. Ephesians 1:4
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Jeannie
Fulbright homeschools her four
children, ages 5 to 12, with her husband in Georgia.
She is the author of Apologia's Elementary Science
Courses: Exploring Creation with Astronomy,
Exploring Creation with Botany, Exploring with
Zoology I: The Flying Creatures of the Fifth
Day, and Exploring Creation with Zoology
II: The Aquatic Creatures of the Fifth Day. For
information on these science courses and homeschooling
tips, visit www.JeannieFulbright.com.
To hear the latest happenings, visit her blog at www.HomeschoolBlogger.com/JeannieFulbright. |
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- The Tiny Planet That Causes Big Problems for Evolution
Our solar system's second-smallest - and speediest - planet is still
causing surprises
By Spike Psarris for Answers
in Genesis
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| Mercury - of the nine known planets of our solar system,
it is the closest to the sun. It is also one of the smallest, only Pluto (the
furthermost) being smaller. Even Ganymede (a moon of Jupiter) and Titan (a moon
of Saturn) are bigger. Yet, tiny Mercury has much to say about the origins of
our solar system.
 Mercury
is a planet of extremes. The side of the planet that faces the sun reaches a temperature
of about 430°C (more than enough to melt lead), while the dark side is a frigid
- 170°. Mercury revolves around the sun every 88 days and has the unusual
characteristic of rotating on its axis exactly three times for every two complete
orbits.
Much of our information about Mercury comes from the Mariner 10 fly-by of 1974
- 75. Lacking the variety and color of some other planets, Mercury's rocky, cratered
surface resembles the moon's. But what is really interesting about Mercury is
the things that can't be seen.
Scientists have discovered that Mercury has the highest density of all the
known planets (other than Earth). Mercury is so dense that it's thought to have
an iron core occupying some 75% of its diameter.1 This extraordinary
density has generated much turmoil and confusion in evolutionary astronomy. Evolutionists
mostly agree on models of planetary formation…but their models say Mercury
can’t be anywhere near as dense as it actually is.
Colliding with evolution
After decades of struggle, most astrophysicists today have given up and admitted
that Mercury's high density cannot be accommodated within slow-and-gradual-development
models.
Instead, the preferred explanation now is that billions of years
ago, a large object crashed into Mercury, stripping away its
lesser-density material and leaving behind the high-density planet
seen today.2
Consider the implications of this. Evolutionists have admitted
that the planet that we see today cannot be explained by
gradual evolutionary processes! This is a stunning admission.
Instead, they propose a long-ago catastrophic collision. What
is the evidence for this collision? Only that Mercury would otherwise
disprove evolution!
Over and over again in astronomy, cosmic collisions are invoked as a sort of
magic wand to rescue evolutionary theories from the facts. The planet Uranus is
tilted over, but evolution says it can't be - therefore, long ago something hit
it and knocked it over. Venus's rotation contradicts evolutionary predictions
- therefore, long ago something hit it and spun it round the opposite way.
Mars's atmosphere is too thin for evolutionist tastes - therefore, it used
to be thicker, but long ago something hit Mars and stripped most of it away. Mercury
is too dense for evolution - therefore, long ago something hit it and conveniently
removed the lighter parts. Evolutionists wave their collision-wand at will and
yet mock as 'unscientific' the Christian belief in a one-off catastrophic global
Flood, despite the abundant physical and historical evidence for it.
Magnetic Mercury
Mercury's challenges to naturalism are not limited to its density. Evolutionists
received another rude jolt when Mercury's magnetic field was discovered. To understand
why this poses a problem, we must discuss evolutionary ideas of planetary magnetism.
Most solar system planets have significant magnetic fields. Where do these
fields come from? Evolutionists (and long-age creationists) hold to a 'dynamo'
theory, which requires those planets with magnetic fields to also have molten
metal cores.
Through a complicated series of events, fluid motions inside the core can supposedly
generate a magnetic field. Evolutionists believe this idea because it is the only
mechanism they have been able to propose by which planets supposedly billions
of years old could still have magnetic fields - all of the other mechanisms would
require that the planets be very young.
Unfortunately for the long-agers, the more we discover about other planets,
the more we find that the dynamo model cannot be true for them.3
This shouldn't really surprise us, however, since many long-agers admit that even
the Earth itself poses huge problems for the dynamo model, and the Earth is the
planet that the model was first invented to explain!4
Back to Mercury. To be billions of years old and still have a magnetic field,
there must be fluid motions within a planet's core. Therefore, the core itself
must be molten. But as one evolutionist says, 'Mercury is so small that the general
opinion is that the planet [i.e. its core] should have frozen solid aeons ago'.5
Therefore, the core cannot be molten, and so evolutionary theories would have
to conclude that Mercury cannot have a magnetic field. But it does!
Some evolutionists speculate that perhaps Mercury's core isn't iron (which
would have 'frozen solid eons ago'), but iron sulfide instead (which wouldn't
necessarily have solidified over these supposed eons). But in solving the problem
for Mercury, a much bigger problem is created.
A fundamental principle of the solar nebula theory (used to explain how our
solar system formed) is that there cannot be any volatile elements such as sulfur
this close to the sun, and so there shouldn't be any iron sulfide in Mercury.
Thus, in trying to rescue a billions-of-years age for Mercury, evolutionists
are undermining the very foundations of their ideas about the formation of the
entire solar system.6
Creationists have no problem explaining the magnetic field of Mercury, nor
that of any other planet. There are several ways in which a young (6,000-year-old)
planet could still have a magnetic field.7 But since evolutionists
reject a young creation, they cannot explain planetary magnetism. As one evolutionist
says, 'Magnetism is almost as much of a puzzle now as it was when William Gilbert
(1544 - 1603) wrote his classic text Concerning Magnetism, Magnetic Bodies,
and the Great Magnet, Earth in 1600'!8
When a Christian examines the solar system, it is easy to wonder if the Creator
designed the planets specifically to confound non-creationary explanations of
them. Repeatedly, new discoveries contradict naturalistic ideas. Ironically enough,
in the case of Mercury, even evolutionists admit to this, after a fashion. They
admit that any attempt to include Mercury in their evolutionary models will doom
the models to failure - they say that Mercury is a 'trap' 9 that has 'seduced'
9 evolutionists, and has had a 'fatal attraction for solar system modellers.'9
So we see that this tiny, seemingly insignificant planet creates enormous stumbling
blocks for those who wish to deny the Creator. Truly, 'God has chosen the foolish
things of the world to confound the wise; and God has chosen the weak things of
the world to confound the things which are mighty' (1 Corinthians 1:27).
Spike Psarris, B.Sc., was previously an engineer in the
United States' military space program. He now works in the commercial sector.
References and notes
- Whether or not the details of this model are correct,
the very high density of Mercury is a fact, as it is based on measurements and
observations. For example, we observed the planet's gravitational pull on Mariner
10.
- 'The driving force behind previous attempts to account
for Mercury has been to fit the high density of the planet into some preferred
overall solar system scheme …. It has become clear that none of these proposed
models work, and the high density is conveniently accommodated by the large-impact
hypothesis, which makes Mercury unique.' Taylor, S.R., Solar System Evolution:
A New Perspective, Cambridge University Press, New York, p. 194, 1992.
- See, for example, Creation 24(3):38
- 40, 2002 for a discussion of Uranus, and Creation 25(1):22
- 24, 2002 for a discussion of Neptune.
- For more documentation, see Sarfati,
J., The
Earth's magnetic field, Creation 20(2):15 - 17,
1998. For a more in-depth explanation, including documentation from a variety
of secular journals, see Humphreys, R., The Earth's magnetic field is still losing
energy, www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/39/39_1/GeoMag.htm,
30 July 2002.
- Taylor, S.R., Destiny or Chance: our solar system
and its place in the cosmos, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 163,
1998.
- Some evolutionists recognize this. 'A pure iron core
would have frozen long ago, so the most likely candidate is an FeS core ….
The presence of the volatile element sulfur as a constituent of the planet closest
to the sun has important implications for models of planetary accretion. If Mercury
contains a substantial (2 - 3%) sulfur content, then this removes much of the
rationale for a heliocentric zoning of nebular composition. Models in which Mercury
accretes from high-temperature components only are no longer viable. If the innermost
planet has a substantial volatile component (although FeS is the probable source
of the sulfur), there is little basis for condensation models of planetary
accumulation based on heliocentric distance.' Ref. 2, p. 191, emphasis added.
- See Humphreys,
R., The creation of planetary magnetic fields, www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/21/21_3/21_3.html,
for one possibility.
- Ref. 5, pp. 163 - 164.
- Ref. 5, p. 166.
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Disclaimer and Warning:
Activities, projects and experiments presented or contained in
this newsletter ("Activities") are intended for educational
and entertainment purposes only. Some Activities may involve health
risks or other hazards, including a risk of serious injury. Responsible
adults should investigate and evaluate all potential health risks
and other hazards prior to engaging in Activities alone or with
minor children. Please exercise caution and take appropriate safety
measures to avoid or lessen the risk of injury to people or property.
Activities are not appropriate for children and teens of all ages.
Children and teenagers should attempt Activities only under direct,
appropriate parental supervision. The Old Schoolhouse Magazine,
LLC accepts no responsibility or liability, express or implied,
for injury, loss or damage of any kind resulting from the use
or misuse of Activities or other information contained in this
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From Steve Walden and the rest of The Old Schoolhouse
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