| (Copyright 2022) by David Rives (Lewisburg, Tennessee) |
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 The Bible tells us that “the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork.” Astronomy is one of my passions. I love looking through telescopes and seeing the incredible and beautiful things God has made and placed throughout the universe for His glory. Researchers estimate there are at least 170 billion galaxies in our observable universe. Each of these galaxies are made of billions or trillions of stars. The number of stars in our universe is just mind-blowing. One type of galaxy, the kind we’re going to look at today, is called a spiral galaxy. Our own Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. These galaxies have a dense cluster of stars in the middle and arms that spiral away from that center. Since the 1930’s astronomers have noticed a problem. The outer stars seem to take more time to complete their orbit than the central portion of the galaxy. This means that, after a few rotations, the spiral arms will lose their shape and basically disappear (as the galaxy winds up). If the universe is billions of years old there shouldn’t be any galaxies with a spiral shape left and yet we find them throughout the universe, including our local galaxy group. Could this be an indicator that the universe is not 13.7 billion years old? Now, to make the problem worse, galaxies that are over 10 billion light years away, and therefore thought to be the youngest galaxies we’ve observed yet, are virtually identical to galaxies that are close by (the ones thought to be much older)! Why has no stellar evolution occurred over such a long period of time? It gets worse! The really visible arms of spiral galaxies contain a lot of blue stars. Blue stars are bright and hot and thought to burn through their fuel relatively quickly. This begs the question: “if the universe is billions of years old, why are there still blue stars everywhere we look?” Many ideas have been thrown around, from collapsing gas clouds to dark matter, but the Bible gives us the answer to all three of these problems. The universe is not billions of years old! God created the stars, and everything else about 6 thousand years ago. We still have spiral galaxies and blue stars because we live in a young universe where we would scientifically expect to still see spirals and blue stars. A young universe that declares the glory of the Creator. I’m David Rives…Truly the heavens declare the glory of God. —————————————————————————————————- See David Rives other articles at: Rives, David – Church of God, Bismarck (church-of-god-bismarck.org) Reprinted with permission from: David Rives Ministries To learn more, visit: https://davidrivesministries.org/ —————————————————————————————————- |
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