Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
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Contrary to popular opinion, planets should not form from just the mutual gravitational attraction of particles orbiting a star, such as our Sun. Orbiting particles should spiral into their star or be scattered or expelled from their orbit—not merge (accrete) to become a planet.a Experiments have shown that colliding particles, instead of sticking together, almost always fragment.b (Similar difficulties exist in trying to form a moon from particles orbiting a planet.)
Despite these problems, let us assume that pebble-size to moon-size particles somehow evolved. “Growing a planet” by many small collisions will produce an almost nonspinning planet, because spins imparted by impacts will be largely self-canceling.c
The growth of a large, gaseous planet (such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune) far from the central star is especially difficult for evolutionist astronomers to explain for several reasons.d
a. Gases dissipate rapidly in the vacuum of outer space, especially the lightest two gases—hydrogen and helium, which comprise most of the mass of the giant planets.
b. Because gas molecules orbiting a star do not gravitationally pull in (or merge with) other gas molecules in the orbiting ring, a rocky planet, about ten or more times larger than Earth, must first form to attract all the gas gravitationally. This must happen very quickly, before the gas dissipates.e (Jupiter’s hydrogen and helium are 300 times more massive than the entire Earth.)
c. Stars like our Sun—even those which evolutionists say are young—do not have enough orbiting hydrogen or helium to form one Jupiter.f
Computer simulations show that Uranus and Neptune could not have evolved anywhere near their present distance from the Sun.g Planets found outside our solar system also contradict the theories for how planets supposedly evolve. [See “Have Planets Been Discovered Outside the Solar System?” on page 530.]
Based on demonstrable science, gaseous planets and the rest of the solar system did not evolve.