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.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
Yes, and, statistically speaking, there appear to be more planets than stars, at least in our Milky Way Galaxy.1 However, what has been learned from these discoveries does not imply that planets evolve or that life exists on such planets. Quite the opposite.2
The media and a few astronomers usually fail to explain important aspects of these discoveries. From 1963–2000, claims were made that planets had been found outside the solar system. Few details were given, so the general impression that planets evolve was reinforced and became textbook orthodoxy. While planets have been discovered, their characteristics contradict all theories proposed during the past 275 years for how planets evolved.3
These theories include: the nebular hypothesis by Emanuel Swedenborg (1734) and later refined by Immanuel Kant (1755) and Pierre-Simon Marquis de Laplace (1796), the planetesimal theory by Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin and Forest Noulton (1901), the tidal theory by James H. Jeans (1917), the accretion theory by Otto Schmidt (1944), the protoplanet theory by William Hunter McCrea (1960), the capture theory by Michael Woolfson (1964), and the solar nebular disk theory by Viktor Safronov (1972). New evolutionary theories are usually proposed when it is recognized that the prior theories do not work. Today, experts agree; no theory for the evolution of planets works.3
Temperatures on most of these exoplanets are too extreme for life.4 Besides, many other requirements must be met for life to exist, and most importantly, life is too complex to have evolved. [See pages 7–27 and "Is There Life in Outer Space?" on page 548.]
What were these false claims that planets had been discovered? In 1963, Peter van de Kamp announced that Barnard’s star wobbled, as if a planet orbited the star. Ten years later, other astronomers showed that the telescope wobbled, not the star. In 1984, major radio and television networks reported that astronomers at Kitt Peak National Observatory had discovered the first planet outside the solar system. Other astronomers, after months of searching, could not verify the claim. Two years later, the astronomers who made that “discovery” acknowledged that atmospheric turbulence probably fooled them, because even they could not find their “planet.” In 1991, British astronomers reported that a star, named Scutum, wobbled with a six-month cycle. They claimed, and the excited media announced, the discovery of the first planet outside our solar system. Later, these astronomers admitted their error. The Earth wobbled slightly, not the star.
On 19 May 1998, NASA announced, amid much fanfare, that the Hubble Space Telescope had made the first direct observation of a planet outside the solar system. An editorial in Nature criticized NASA’s premature announcement. “One does not need to read between the lines to perceive a deep need within NASA for publicity.”5 Two years later, the astronomer making the “discovery” retracted her claim.6 What she thought was a planet was a star dimmed by interstellar dust. Other false alarms involved astronomers eager for publicity who joined with media eager to sell an exciting story. Misinformation resulted. Unfortunately, the media rarely retracts reports that are later disproven, and textbooks, which change slowly, have yet to catch up.
Several stars are surrounded by disks of gas and dust, which a few astronomers thought might be merging to form planets. Some of these astronomers also believe that finding such disks confirms the theory that planets evolve from gas and dust orbiting a star. However, it is now known that on rare occasions the outer envelope of a sunlike star can be ejected into a disk-shaped cloud.7
Since 2000, sophisticated techniques have identified more than 3,567 planets outside our solar system. One technique accurately measures a star’s wobble, indicating that a possible planet orbits that star. A second technique measures the slight but periodic dimming of a star, suggesting that a planet is passing between the star and Earth. Other planets have been detected based on the way their gravity bends light rays we see from a light source behind the planet. A few telescopes have directly spotted extremely large planets that are far from the glare of the stars they orbit.
What has been learned? As one astronomer wrote, these newly discovered planets “spell the end for established theories of planet formation.”3 How do these extrasolar planets contradict evolution theories? One planet has been found in a tight cluster of tens of thousands of stars that would disrupt the evolution of any planet. That cluster is also devoid of the heavy chemical elements thought necessary to evolve a planet.8 At least 30 separate planets each orbit a pair of suns whose constantly changing positions would disrupt any slow evolution of a planet.9 One planet has been repeatedly observed eclipsing each of the eccentric binary stars it orbits. The forty-nine experts who discovered this planet admit that they have no theoretical understanding for how such a planetary system could have evolved.10 One planetary system (having at least two planets) orbits a pair of suns! 11 A Jupiter-size planet has been found orbiting three suns! Its orbit is so close to one star (0.05 AU) that it would have been pulled apart and overheated before it could have evolved. Worse yet, two other stars orbit the first star at a distance of 12.3 AU. They would also prevent the planet from evolving.12 Other planets orbit binaries in other strange configurations.13
Some planets are so near their star that they are losing mass too rapidly to have been planets for very long.14 Besides, their rocky cores would have melted before the planet’s evolution could begin.15 Others are too far from their star and the dust near the star needed to grow a planet. Also, their slow motion at those great distances would “scoop up” little dust. One extreme example is a planet that is 650 AU from its star (650 times the Earth-Sun distance).16 That great distance may have resulted from the stretching of space during the creation week, as explained on pages 447–462.
If planets have evolved, friction from the gas and dust around a young star would have circularized each planet’s orbit. Many extrasolar planets have very elongated and/or highly inclined orbits as opposed to the orbits of the planets in our solar system. A few planets orbit their star in directions opposite to the direction the star rotates.17 Neither elongated, nor tilted, nor retrograde orbits would evolve from swirling dust clouds.
Some relatively cool, “rogue” planets (not associated with any star) are being discovered wandering alone in deep space. Experts admit that, “The formation of young, free-floating, planetary-mass objects like these is difficult to explain by our current models of how planets form.” 18
One extrasolar planetary system, called Kepler-11, consists of six planets orbiting in nearly the same plane. They are so close to their star that collisions and orbital perturbations should have quickly destroyed their compact, “flat” arrangement19—unless they are extremely young.
What is clear is that for both our solar system’s planets and for the extrasolar planets, evolutionary explanations have been shattered. Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of people have been misled by claims that planets evolved. Even the “experts” who have been telling us these stories will now admit that they were wrong.20
So what accounts for planets (solar and extrasolar)? They could have been created directly. A second possibility, explained on pages 447–461, is that planets formed from densely packed matter just before the heavens were stretched out.