Astronomy Arguments to Retire

Faulkner.  “An Evaluation of Astronomical Young-Age Determination Methods 2: Solar, Stellar, Galactic, and Extragalactic.”  Answers Research Journal 12:329–349.  2019.  The second of two papers in which Danny Faulkner, a young-earth astronomer, grades 23 astronomical arguments for a young sun, stars and galaxies.  Faulkner recommends dropping the arguments that fail and says some of the others appear strong.  The article uses it for the four ways a bad age argument fails, and for the point that Faulkner names the first of those failures twice.

1. 1a.

   Two papers in which Danny Faulkner, a professional astronomer with a PhD who works for Answers in Genesis, grades 48 young-age astronomy arguments.  Faulkner retires 32 of them, keeps 14 and leaves 2 undecided.  The article agrees with most of these verdicts and disagrees with the author about two of the 14 that were kept.  Cited here as url https://answersresearchjournal.org/astronomical-age-solar-system/.  Part 1 retires 11 (Dodwell; meteorites in strata; lunar dust; rock flow on the Moon; Mercury's atmosphere; tall mountains on Venus; high winds on Venus; dust storms on Mars; high winds on Jupiter and Saturn; hydrogen in Titan's atmosphere; the orbit of Triton; the lifetimes of Chiron and Hidalgo), keeps 12 (lunar ghost craters; lunar recession; Phobos and Deimos; heat loss from the Jovian planets; volcanism on Io; cryovolcanism on Enceladus and Triton; methane in Titan's atmosphere; planetary rings; Poynting-Robertson; meteor shower dispersion; comets; Earth-crossing asteroids), and leaves 2 undecided (transient lunar phenomena; Pluto and Charon).  The retire row lists twelve items because the Titan section splits into a retired hydrogen argument and a kept methane argument, while Faulkner counts the section once.  Part 2 is at pp. 329–349.  Part 2 retires 21 (solar corona temperature; shrinking Sun; solar neutrino problem; solar lithium and beryllium; differential solar rotation; interstellar grain formation; red Sirius; the Algol paradox; rapidly changing stars; dust around hot stars; technetium stars; recurrent novae; fast binaries; supernova remnants; break-up of star clusters; collapse of elliptical galaxies; break-up of galaxy clusters; luminous bridges; fast burn rate of hot stars; fast burn rate of quasars; Olbers' paradox) and keeps 2 (the faint young Sun paradox; the persistence of spiral arms).  Rybka 1993 is the single most-corrected source in Part 1, with eight items, and is still cited approvingly on five others.  Neither paper has a section on main-sequence turnoff fitting, cluster isochrones, white dwarf cooling ages, or nucleocosmochronology, which are the four methods that mainstream stellar-age determination actually rests on.  Faulkner grades what creationists have asserted, not what the mainstream case is built from.  See stellar and galactic ages. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 1b.

   Section abstract:  “I evaluate 23 astronomical arguments for recent origin for the sun, stars, and galaxies that biblical creationists have used.  Some of the arguments are found to be wanting, and I thus recommend discontinuing their use.  Other arguments for young age appear to be strong.  Further work on even the good young-age indicators is desirable, along with development of new arguments for recent creation.” ↩

3. 1c.

   Page 348, section Conclusion:  “I discourage the use of those young-age indicators that do not survive scrutiny. …  Since many of the arguments for recent creation that I have evaluated have turned out to be poor arguments, it might cause some to despair.  However, we must be vigilant to ensure that our arguments for recent creation are good.  Furthermore, there remain good arguments for recent origin.” ↩

4. 1d.

   Page 348:  “Though not directly related to the issue at hand, there is not yet a coherent creation model of astronomy.  A creationary model of astronomy likely would facilitate development of new arguments for recent origin.  One impediment to this development has been the question of how much of what we see in the universe today is attributable to the creation and how much may be due to physical processes since creation.  Different views on this exist with the creation astronomy community.  Hopeful development of a creation model of astronomy will clarify this situation.” ↩

5. 1e.

   Page 329:  PDF p. 1, right column.  The paper's first argument, which the paper flags as folklore rather than literature:  “This is an example of an argument of recent origin that does not appear in the creation literature.  However, it has been mentioned in oral presentations in the past”.  “There are at least two problems with this argument.  First, it is not accompanied by a calculation of the current cooling rate of the corona.  What if the cooling time for the corona is far less than a few thousand years?  If so, then even in the recent creation model there is a solar coronal heating problem.  Second, even though there is no generally agreed upon explanation of the source of the corona's high temperature, it does not mean that there is not one. …  Given these two problems, the corona's high temperature is not a good argument for recent origin.”  One point in the treatment is dated.  The paper names "acoustic wave heating and magnetic reconnection" as the two strong candidates, but the acoustic option was largely ruled out by SOHO in the 1990s, and the live mainstream pair since about 2000 has been nanoflare reconnection and Alfvén-wave or ion-cyclotron turbulence. ↩ ↩ ↩

6. 1f.

   Page 334:  PDF p. 6.  On differential solar rotation, attributed to Boardman, Koontz and Morris 1973, pp. 148–149, and Rybka 1993, p. 62:  “Boardman, Koontz, and Morris (1973, 148-149) and Rybka (1993, 62) suggested that this situation is unstable, for viscous forces would lead to the entire sun spinning at a single rate, implying that the sun is young.  However, this overlooks several things.  For instance, what is the timescale of this simplistic analysis?  It could be far less than even thousands of years, so this would pose a problem even the recent creation model. …  But, more importantly, the sun's differential rotation most likely due to convection in the sun combined with the Coriolis effect.  This probably is not a good argument for recent creation.”  The grammatical slips are in the original. ↩

7. 1g.

   Page 336, section The Red Sirius Anomaly:  “Furthermore, newly produced white dwarfs are extremely hot (typically in excess of 100,000 K), and they exponentially cool.  This cooling process is well-understood physically.  Sirius B is far too cool (25,000 K) to be a white dwarf that is merely 2,000 years old.  One could hypothesize that red giants transform into white dwarfs via some other mechanism, but without some discussion of what that mechanism might be, it would be difficult to take such a proposal seriously.”  And, rejecting it on principle:  “First, it tacitly accepts an idea of stellar evolution, something that creationists generally are loathe to do.  We ought not to selectively choose which parts of stellar evolution theory we wish to accept.  And if we are going to accept this portion of stellar evolution sans the time element involved, we ought to give physical reasons why the time to make this transformation is so short (astronomers give physical reasons why they expect it to take so long).”  The paper names DeYoung and Lisle 2009, p. 192, among the sources making the claim. ↩ ↩

8. 1h.

   Page 339:  PDF p. 11, right column.  Footnote 3 of the paper, on the same page:  “Again, I could find no mention of this in the creation literature, but it has been mentioned in oral presentations.”  The passage:  “Some metal stars have absorption lines of technetium in their spectra.  There are no stable isotopes of technetium, and none of its isotopes have half-lives more than a few million years.  Some biblical creationists have pointed out that the presence of technetium in these stars shows that the stars are not billions of years old.  However, no one suggests that the technetium has been present in these stars for nearly that long.  Instead, the technetium was recently introduced and eventually will decay away.  Therefore, the presence of technetium in a few stars is not a good argument for recent origin.” ↩

9. 1i.

   Section The Algol Paradox and Pre-Main Sequence Binaries:  “Resolution of the Algol paradox was not long in coming.  The stars in an Algol system orbit so closely to one another that as one star evolves off the main sequence, tidal forces raised on it by its main sequence companion pulls matter off the evolving star. …  Lest anyone think that this is mere speculation, there is abundant evidence that this is the case (Kaitchuck 1992). …  In fact, I once participated in a program of simultaneous spectroscopy and photometry investigating the accretion disk around the primary star of U Cephei, an Algol-type eclipsing binary (Kaitchuck, Honeycutt, and Faulkner 1989).  The Algol paradox has not been discussed in the creation literature, but some creationists have mentioned it in presentations, suggesting either that it was a problem for evolutionary thinking in astronomy (it isn't) or that it somehow indicates recent origin (it doesn't).”  The creationist versions Faulkner names are West 1981 and Rybka 1993. ↩

10. 1j.

    Pages 333–334:  On Davies 1996's lithium/beryllium argument:  “Davies reasoned that this limits the central temperature of the sun to greater than 3 million K, but less than 4 million K.  The equilibrium core temperature of the sun is far greater, in excess of 15 million K.  But this equilibrium temperature takes considerable time to achieve, so Davies concluded that the sun must be very young.”  Page 334:  The rebuttal:  “The problem with this argument is that it assumes that the sun's core and photospheric compositions are the same. …  The convective zone of the photosphere extends down to the region where the temperature is at least 3 million K so that lithium throughout the sun is depleted.  However, the convective zone does not extend down to the region where the temperature is 4 million K.  Hence, while lithium is depleted in the sun's photosphere, beryllium is not.  See Ahrens, Stix, and Thorn (1992) for more details.  This is not a good argument for the sun's recent origin.” ↩

11. 1k.

    Pages 329–330:  On the original:  “In 1979, John Eddy and Aram Boornazian gave a presentation at the 154th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in which they presented evidence that the sun may be shrinking (Eddy and Boornazian 1979). …  Eddy and Boornazian found a monotonic decrease in the sun's angular diameter at the rate of about 0.1%/century.”  The format matters, and the article states it: this was a Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society meeting abstract, not a refereed paper.  Page 330:  On its fate:  “Not surprisingly, most astronomers rejected the possibility of a shrinking sun.  Soon several papers were published refuting the shrinking sun with additional historical data.  Very telling is that the initial presentation of Eddy and Boornazian was a preliminary work, but neither one of them ever addressed that work again.”  On the retraction:  “The most exhaustive treatment of the shrinking sun in the creation literature is that of DeYoung and Rush (1989), who discussed much of the refutation of Eddy and Boornazian and the lack of response by the original authors.  DeYoung and Rush concluded that the evidence was ambiguous enough that one could not be certain whether the sun is powered by gravitational contraction, nuclear fusion, or a combination of both, and hence the sun is not a good age indicator on this front.”  Faulkner lists the creationist users as Ackerman 1986, pp. 55–64; Akridge 1980 (printed "Ackridge"); Hinderliter 1980a, 1980b, 1983; Morris 1985, pp. 169–170; Rybka 1993, pp. 58–61; and Hanson 1981.  DeYoung and Rush are the same pair who retracted the moon-dust argument four years later. ↩ ↩

12. 1l.

    Section Break-up of Star Clusters:  “Creationists have cited the break-up time of open star clusters as evidence of recent origin (Slusher, 1974;  Slusher 1980a, 16;  Slusher 1980b, 59).  Rybka (1993, 102) did a simple calculation showing that the break-up time was on the order of millions of years, referring to the work of V.A. Ambartsumian.  However, it appears that the intended work of Ambartsumian was about very loose groupings of stars called associations. …  Consider the Pleiades, the best example of an open cluster.  Converse and Stahler (2010) have modeled the dynamics of the Pleiades and found that it will dissipate in approximately one billion years. …  However, the estimated evolutionary age of the Pleiades is about 125 million years, so there is no conflict …  Most astronomers think that globular clusters are very old, forming shortly after the big bang.  Gnedin and Ostriker (1997) found that globular clusters disrupt in time approximately that of the big bang age of the universe. …  For all types of clusters and associations, it appears that there is no conflict between their evolutionary ages and their dynamic ages.  Perhaps some early work on this subject in the creation literature did not fully address the issues involved. …  At any rate, the break-up time of star clusters does not appear to be a good evidence for recent creation.” ↩

13. 1m.

    Page 343:  In the section on the break-up of galaxy clusters, on why creationists resisted dark matter, the paper says that dark matter:  “was an attempt to continue using the dispersion velocities of clusters of galaxies as an argument for recent origin.”  In The Expanse of Heaven (2017), Ch. 9, the principle is stated:  Chapter 9:  “our motivation ought not to be maintaining our model.”  A nuance worth recording: DeYoung 2000 is split rather than simply pro-dark-matter.  DeYoung 2000 accepts dark matter within galaxies ("Galaxies can be assumed to be stable, and thus must contain some form of dark matter") while treating clusters as possibly unbound, and quietly revises Rybka's dispersal time from a few hundred Myr up to "a billion year time scale." ↩ ↩

14. 1n.

    Page 333:  The paper's statement of the physics:  “Computation shows that if the sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, it was about 40% fainter then.  And the sun was about 25% fainter 3.5 billion years ago, when life supposedly first developed on earth.  A change in 25% in the sun's luminosity translates to a 17 deg C change in the earth's average temperature.  The average temperature of the earth today is 15 C, so the expected average temperature 3.5 billion years ago would have been −2 C.”  The concession:  “Clearly, this is not a problem if the earth is only thousands of years old, so recent creationists have made use of the young faint paradox as evidence of the sun's youth (Brown 2008, 28-29;  Faulkner, 1998, 2001).”  The verdict, at the final line of the section:  “It appears that the faint young sun paradox is a good argument for recent origin.”  The specific error the article names:  “This balance must have remained in place for billions of years, without reliance on any feedback mechanism.”  The standard resolution is the carbonate-silicate weathering thermostat (Walker, Hays and Kasting 1981), which is a negative feedback and is the whole point of the proposal.  The creationist sources here are Oard 2011 (Journal of Creation 25, no. 2: 17–19) and Coppedge 2013.  The age of the solar system treats the paradox itself as real and unsolved, and reaches the same verdict about its use as an age argument. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

Rush, David E., and Larry Vardiman.  “Pre-Flood Vapor Canopy Radiative Temperature Profiles.”  Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism 2:231–246.  Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh.  1990.  A radiation model of a water-vapour canopy above the atmosphere, by David E. Rush and Larry Vardiman.  They ran LOWTRAN 7, a standard atmospheric radiance code, to pure radiative equilibrium, for canopies of different sizes.  The article uses it because the authors' own model shows that even a canopy of 50 mb would make the surface too hot to live on, and because they concede that a thin canopy would hardly supply the rain for the Flood.

1. 2a.

   Section Abstract, page 231:  “It is found that water vapor canopies ranging in size from 10 to 1013 mb produce temperatures at the canopy base hot enough to maintain water in the vapor phase, and hence ensure a stable canopy.  However, canopies in the range from 50 to 1013 mb, and perhaps even canopies from 10 to 50 mb, also produce inhospitably high surface temperatures.  The addition of clouds in future work would appear to hold promise of modifying these conclusions greatly.” ↩

2. 2b.

   Page 237:  “In conclusion, only 50 mb of water vapor added above the present atmosphere would raise the surface temperature as determined by a radiation balance from 320 K to 409 K.”  Page 236:  The scale of a 50 mb canopy is given on this page:  “50 mb of water vapor is equivalent to 20 inches of precipitable water”.  half a metre, one twenty-fourth of Dillow's canopy.  The surface temperature of 409 K is.  “35° above the boiling point of water at 1063 mb”.  on page 236.  Page 237:  Their comparison on page 237 makes the point about water vapour specifically:  “Kasting and Ackerman (1986) added 10 bars of CO₂ and got a surface temperature of only 400 K, including convection effects, at present solar luminosity.  Truly, the water molecule has an amazing ability to absorb radiation.”  Page 238:  Their conclusions:  “Radiation considerations strongly suggest surface temperatures are not suitable for the 1013, 125, and 50 mb canopies.  The canopy blanket is simply so effective that the surface temperature becomes inhospitable.”  They credit a critic honestly on the same page:  “Morton (1979) was apparently the first to conclude that the canopy would have made the earth's surface too hot for human habitation …  Life as we know it would not have been possible under a canopy of 1013 mb (1 atm), nor even with a canopy of only 50 mb.” ↩ ↩

3. 2c.

   Page 238:  “It does seem reasonable to suppose that somewhere between 0 and 50 mb there exists a value that would lead to a successful canopy.  Remarkably, this is the same conclusion reached by Kofahl (1977) with his 'sliderule estimates.'  He suggested a total water vapor content in the atmosphere-canopy of six inches, or five inches (12 mb) more than the atmosphere alone.  The chief drawback to a thin canopy is that it would not significantly contribute to the 40 days and nights of rain for the Flood.”  Page 245:  The concession in the published closure, on page 245:  “As Mr. Oard correctly notes, our 50 mb canopy (20 inches of precipitable water) would hardly provide 40 days and nights of heavy rainfall.  The collapse of the canopy may not have contributed much water to the Flood, but the canopy in place before the Flood would certainly have had a dramatic effect on climate.” ↩ ↩

4. 2d.

   Page 244:  In the published closure:  “The chief reason why we cannot allow thick clouds is a Biblical one: heavenly objects need to be visible, at least during part of the diurnal cycle.”  The reference is Genesis 1:14-18, where the lights in the expanse serve "for signs and for seasons." ↩ ↩

Vardiman, Larry, and Karen Bousselot.  “Sensitivity Studies on Vapor Canopy Temperature Profiles.”  Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Creationism, 607–618.  1998.  A sensitivity study by Larry Vardiman and Karen Bousselot, which varies five parameters of a water-vapour canopy model and reports how the surface temperature responds.  The article uses it because the authors say radiation modelling severely limits the water a canopy can hold, and because their own conclusion puts the canopy's water at about one metre, less than 10% of the water content suggested by Dillow (1982).

1. 3a.

   Section Introduction, page 607:  “It has become increasingly obvious through radiation modeling that the strong greenhouse effect produced by water vapor severely limits the amount of water than can be maintained in a canopy which is in contact with the atmosphere.  For example, Rush and Vardiman (1990) found that a canopy containing enough water vapor to create 50 millibars of pressure at its base (the equivalent of about 0.5 meters of precipitable water) would produce a surface temperature of over 400K.  Even a water vapor canopy containing only 0.1 meters of precipitable water would produce a surface temperature of about 335K.”  335 K is 62 °C, from four inches of extra water vapour.  Page 608:  “When a water vapor canopy containing 0.5 meters of precipitable water was introduced above today's atmosphere … the surface temperature rose even more due to the enhanced greenhouse effect to over 400K.  This temperature is above the boiling point of water, making life as we know it impossible on the earth.” ↩ ↩

2. 3b.

   Section Conclusions, page 616:  “If all five parameters were introduced into the model simultaneously such that the surface temperature was minimized, it is estimated that the water content of the canopy could possibly be raised to as much as 1.0 meter.  This is less than 10% of the water content suggested by Dillow (1982).  Unfortunately, this amount of water in a canopy would not contribute significantly to the waters of the Genesis Flood or produce significant pressure and density effects.”  “Although this result is disappointing for advocates of a vapor canopy, the story may not yet be complete.”  Their last recommendation, on the same page:  “If these efforts fail to permit a sizeable quantity of water to be maintained in the canopy, then consideration should be given to exploring canopies in orbits above the atmosphere where thermodynamic considerations do not constrain the quantity of water.”  The abstract, on page 607, says "as much as 2.0 meters", while the conclusions say "as much as 1.0 meter".  Both numbers should be reported, because the paper gives two figures a factor of two apart.  Vardiman carried the 1.0 m figure forward.  The article's table ends with Vardiman, Proceedings of the Fifth ICC (2003), page 29, where a thick canopy is revivable only if the solar constant was below 25 per cent of today's. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

Computed for this article and reproducible:  html/unpublished-ai/astronomy-arguments-to-retire/research/winding.ts, a short Deno script, run with deno run winding.ts.  Inputs:  a flat rotation curve at 236 km/s with R₀ = 8.15 kpc (Reid et al. 2019, ApJ 885:131, from VLBI parallaxes of 147 masers in high-mass star-forming regions), 3.0857 × 10¹⁶ km per kiloparsec, 3.1557 × 10⁷ s per Julian year.  A flat curve is deliberately the worst case for the mainstream and the best case for the winding argument, because it maximises the shear.  Outputs:  orbital periods of 104 Myr at 4 kpc, 212 Myr at 8.15 kpc, 417 Myr at 16 kpc;  one extra full wrap between 4 and 16 kpc every 139 Myr;  7.2 extra wraps after 1 Gyr and 98.0 after 13.6 Gyr;  and pitch angles for a sheared material arm at the solar radius of 18.66° at 100 Myr, 7.69° at 250 Myr, 3.86° at 500 Myr, 1.93° at 1 Gyr and 0.14° at 13.6 Gyr.  Observed pitch angles in real spirals run roughly 10–25°, with the Milky Way's arms at about 10–14°.  An independent calculation in research/galactic-arguments.md §1a, using Eilers et al. 2019 (v_c = 229.0 ± 0.2 km/s at R₀ = 8.122 kpc), gives a 218 Myr solar-radius period and reaches 10° in 197 Myr;  Faulkner's own figures — 250 Myr and about 40 orbits — are within 15 per cent of both.  The premise of the winding argument is not in dispute anywhere. ↩ ↩

Lin, C. C., and Frank H. Shu.  “On the Spiral Structure of Disk Galaxies.”  Astrophysical Journal 140:646–655.  1964.  The founding paper of density-wave theory, by two mathematicians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  It argues that the stars and gas of a disk can maintain a density wave through their gravity, and it gives a formula for the spiral's shape.  The article uses it because the paper itself prints the rival view, that arms are destroyed by rotation and regenerated, sixteen years before the creationist winding argument appeared in Slusher 1980.  Mirror:  Articles.adsabs.harvard.edu

1. 5a.

   Page 646:  “There are at least two possible types of spiral theories.  The first alternative is to associate every spiral arm with a given body of matter;  e.g., such an arm might essentially be a tube of gas primarily constrained by the interstellar magnetic field.  The difficulty with the disrupting influence of differential rotation in such a theory is well known. …  The second alternative is to regard the spiral structure as a wave pattern, which either remains stationary, or at least quasi-stationary, in a frame of reference rotating around the center of the galaxy at a proper angular speed (possibly zero).”  The authors set out both theories side by side, and they state their own hypothesis as a hypothesis.  It is in italics in the original, under the heading "IV. HYPOTHESIS OF QUASI-STATIONARY SPIRAL STRUCTURE" on page 650.  On the same page they add:  Page 650:  “In advancing this hypothesis, we are not ignoring the fact that transient local patterns of a general spiral form are relatively easy to produce in a system in rotation.” ↩ ↩

2. 5b.

   Page 646:  “Toomre tends to favor the first of the possibilities described above.  In his point of view, the material clumping is periodically destroyed by differential rotation and regenerated by gravitational instability.”  Lin and Shu's stated objection to Toomre's view is aesthetic and specific, and it is not a claim that the mechanism fails:  “It is somewhat difficult to see how this mechanism alone can account for the relatively regular spiral pattern over the whole disk in most of the flat galaxies”.  This sentence, printed in the founding paper of density-wave theory, is the modern mainstream position.  It predates the appearance of the creationist winding argument in Slusher 1980 by sixteen years. ↩ ↩

Foyle, K. et al.  “Observational Evidence Against Long-Lived Spiral Arms in Galaxies.”  Astrophysical Journal 735:101.  2011.  Page 1:  “In none of the resulting tracer cross-correlations for this sample do we find systematic angular offsets, which would be expected for a stationary dynamical spiral pattern of well-defined pattern speed.  This result indicates that spiral density waves in their simplest form are not an important aspect of explaining spirals in large disk galaxies.”  The authors test whether spiral patterns hold still, using twelve nearby spirals, with maps of neutral hydrogen (THINGS), carbon monoxide (HERACLES), 24-micron infrared light (Spitzer/SINGS), far-ultraviolet light (GALEX) and, for some galaxies, 3.6-micron infrared light (IRAC).  They look for the offsets that a fixed spiral pattern would leave between gas and young stars, and find none.  The article uses it because its authors conclude that spiral density waves in their simplest form are not an important part of explaining spirals in large disk galaxies.  The non-detection is contested: Sellwood and Masters, on their page 32, write that "others (Chandar et al. 2017, Yu & Ho 2018, Miller et al. 2019, Peterken et al. 2019) claim to have detected them.  However, none of these careful studies was able to establish a fixed pattern speed over the entire radial extent of the spiral."  Mirror:  arXiv ↩

1. 6a.

   Section 6, page 12:  “The fact that there is little evidence for angular offsets between SF tracers as predicted by the model of a long-lived spiral structure with a constant pattern speed lends support to a model with a transient spiral structure that reorganizes the interstellar medium … or models that have spiral arms forming due to the shearing of gas and stars by differential rotation.”  Page 1:  Their introduction sets out the two-family framing, in which the alternative to quasi-stationary structure is described as:  “spirals are short-lived, recurrent, transient patterns that originate from recurrent gravitational instabilities.”  This is a paper against one theory of spiral structure whose authors say their result supports the other, and the other is the one under which arms wind up and are remade. ↩ ↩

Zaritsky, Dennis et al.  “Inner spiral structure of the galaxy M51.”  Nature 364:313–315.  Jul 22, 1993.  Section Abstract:  “To minimize the effects of dust and maximize sensitivity to the dominant stellar population, we have obtained K-band (2.2-μm) images of the nearby 'grand-design' spiral galaxy NGC5194 (M51).  Our observations reveal remarkable dynamical structures not visible in conventional optical images.  We find that the spiral arms extend significantly further towards the galaxy's centre than previously observed and can be traced continuously through almost three revolutions — roughly twice as far as with optical images.  The coherence of the arms over this large radial range challenges current theories of spiral structure.  We suggest that a combination of several mechanisms, such as the interaction of M51 with the neighbouring galaxy NGC5195, forcing by the central 'bar', or distortions from density waves, is required to generate the observed structure.”  A research paper in Nature reporting infrared images, at 2.2 micrometres, of the grand-design spiral galaxy NGC5194 (M51).  The images show the spiral arms reaching closer to the centre than optical pictures show, and the authors say a combination of several mechanisms is needed to explain the structure.  The article uses it because the authors say the arms' coherence challenges current theories of spiral structure. ↩ ↩

Humphreys, D. Russell.  “Evidence for a Young World.”  Acts & Facts 34(6).  Jun 1, 2005.  A list of fourteen natural phenomena, written for ICR's Impact No. 384 by Dr. Russell Humphreys and reprinted by Answers in Genesis.  It argues that each process sets a maximum age far below the billions of years that evolutionary theory needs.  The article uses it for two items: item 1, the claim that galaxies wind up too fast, and item 2, the missing supernova remnants, which Faulkner retracted in 2017 but which Answers in Genesis still serves uncorrected.  Mirror:  Answersingenesis.org

1. 8a.

   Section Item 1, Galaxies wind themselves up too fast:  “For the last few decades the favored attempt to resolve the puzzle has been a complex theory called 'density waves.'  The theory has conceptual problems, has to be arbitrarily and very finely tuned, and has been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope's discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the 'Whirlpool' galaxy, M51.”  Two defects, one checkable in a line.  The observation was not made by the Hubble Space Telescope.  Zaritsky et al.'s abstract says 'we have obtained K-band (2.2-μm) images', and Hubble had no infrared camera at all until NICMOS was installed on Servicing Mission 2 in February 1997, four years after the paper.  And 'very detailed spiral structure in the central hub' is not a fact that embarrasses an old galaxy, because the authors say it requires several dynamical mechanisms to explain. ↩ ↩

2. 8b.

   Section Item 2 of fourteen:  Served at Answers in Genesis, with the byline 'on June 1, 2005', in five translations (French, Dutch, Chinese, Greek, Italian), and at ICR, dated 'WEDNESDAY, JUNE 01, 2005'.  Both copies are still uncorrected and unannotated.  “According to astronomical observations, galaxies like our own experience about one supernova (a violently-exploding star) every 25 years.  The gas and dust remnants from such explosions (like the Crab Nebula) expand outward rapidly and should remain visible for over a million years.  Yet the nearby parts of our galaxy in which we could observe such gas and dust shells contain only about 200 supernova remnants.  That number is consistent with only about 7,000 years worth of supernovas.”  This is the sharpest datum in Part 8 of the article.  It is not an outside critic's observation: it follows entirely from Answers in Genesis's own two pages.  Faulkner works for Answers in Genesis and published the retraction in Answers in Genesis's own journal in 2017. ↩ ↩

IAEA.  Ground-state half-lives, IAEA Live Chart of Nuclides / ENSDF data service.  n.d.  Retrieved Sep 1, 2026.  Tc-99: (2.111 ± 0.012) × 10⁵ yr, β⁻ 100 % (evaluators Browne, Tuli).  Tc-97: (4.21 ± 0.16) × 10⁶ yr, electron capture (Nica).  Tc-98: (4.2 ± 0.3) × 10⁶ yr, β⁻ (Chen, Singh).  Tc-96: 4.28 ± 0.07 d.  Tc-95: 20.0 ± 1 h.  The isotope the s-process actually makes is Tc-99, via neutron capture up to Mo-99, which beta-decays.  Tc-97 and Tc-98 are shielded from the s-process path.  So the relevant clock is 211,000 years, not the "few million" Faulkner quotes.  The measured half-lives of the technetium isotopes, from the data service of the International Atomic Energy Agency.  The article uses it for the one figure that matters here: technetium-99 has a half-life of 211,000 years, not the "few million" usually quoted. ↩ ↩

Jorissen, A., and S. Van Eck.  Barium and Tc-poor S Stars: Binary Masqueraders Among Carbon Stars.  1997.  Page 8:  “All Tc-poor S stars are binary stars, as expected, but moreover, they are restricted to Sb < 5 km s⁻¹.”  Page 1:  Their framing:  “Tc-rich (or 'intrinsic') S stars are genuine thermally-pulsing AGB stars where the s-process operates in relation with the thermal pulses, and where the third dredge-up brings the freshly synthesized s-elements (including Tc) to the surface…  By contrast, Tc-poor (or 'extrinsic') S stars are believed to be the cool descendants of barium stars.”  Pages 8–9:  A second, independent confirmation from Galactic structure:  “Intrinsic S stars are clearly more concentrated towards the galactic plane than extrinsic S stars.”  A 1997 paper that sorts the S stars, which are carbon stars enriched in heavy elements, into two kinds.  The intrinsic kind makes its own technetium, and the extrinsic kind, which is technetium-poor, is believed to be the cool descendants of barium stars.  The authors report that every technetium-poor S star they checked is a binary, and the article uses that because it is a prediction that could have failed and did not. ↩ ↩

Hephaestion of Thebes.  Apotelesmatica.  n.d.  Section 1.23.30:  Quoted by Roger Ceragioli in 1995, page 208; the bracketed transliterations are Ceragioli's.  “…if the star [i.e. Sirius] rose great and white and if it came through with its colour, then the Nile's current would rise high and there would be abundance;  but if it was flame-coloured [pyrrhos] and the colour of red ochre [miltodes] there would be war.”  The article is titled.  “The Debate Concerning 'Red' Sirius,”.  and it appeared in Journal for the History of Astronomy 26 (1995): 187–226.  A Greek work from the 4th–5th century AD that lists the omens read from the colour of Sirius when the star rose.  The article uses it because the source records Sirius changing colour from year to year at its heliacal rising, which a fixed star does not do. ↩ ↩

Census of post-retraction circulation of retired creationist astronomy arguments.  Sep 1, 2026.  Two clear post-retraction affirmative uses of the missing supernova remnants argument were found.  David F. Coppedge's "Not Enough Supernovas for Deep Time," at https://crev.info/2023/09/sn1987a-supernovas-shortage/, on Creation-Evolution Headlines, byline 6 September 2023, says:  “The shortage of SNRs comes from belief in Deep Time.  Most of the visible ones are less than the Biblical age of creation”.  Charles Jackson's "Where Have the Supernovae Remnants Gone?" on The Creation Club, with datePublished 26 June 2022, has its substance in an embedded video that was not transcribed, so only its dated title and description are established.  Red Sirius, one use: Creation Moments, "The Mystery of Red Sirius," dateline 21 October 2025, sourced to Ackerman 1986 p. 67, asserting:  “There can be no question that Sirius was red”.  and attributing the ancient reports to Sirius B, a star nobody observed before 1862.  Contrast David Rives on the same evidence (2012/2014), who allows that it.  “may have been a simple error”.  and draws no conclusion.  Zero affirmative post-retraction uses were found for solar neutrinos, the shrinking Sun or star-cluster break-up, and none for moon dust, although one 2024 item keeps the machinery while withholding the conclusion.  Counter-findings, recorded to prevent inflation.  Search-engine dates were wrong three times in this sweep.  Brave dated Walt Brown's technical note 2025-02-27, but the page reads.  “02/27/20”.  ; it dated a CMI star-formation page 2023, but the page reads.  “Published 28 Jul, 2015”.  ; and it dated Sarfati's supernova page 2019, although the page's own date line is given on the how line.  Creation Moments'.  “Proof That the Moon Is Young”.  is gone (a soft 404).  Walt Brown's Technical Note 8 does not make the moon-dust inference, because it reports the 1-in-67 pulverised-rock correction.  Jason Lisle wrote a full article on star clusters in June 2024 without touching the retired break-up argument.  One undated, unattributed page making the supernova-remnant argument (creationdiscovery.org) was found and is deliberately not cited, because nothing about its provenance is established.  A census of young-earth websites, made by the article itself on 1 September 2026, that searched 329 indexed young-earth domains and read every date off the page.  Of the seven retired arguments, four have effectively stopped circulating: solar neutrinos, the shrinking Sun, star-cluster break-up and moon dust.  The article cites it for which retired arguments still circulate and for the post-retraction uses it found. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

Answers in Genesis.  Arguments to Avoid.  n.d.  Retrieved Sep 1, 2026.  Moon dust was retired by AiG's own Andrew Snelling in 1993 and has never been listed; the shrinking Sun was retired by DeYoung and Rush in 1989 and is not listed; and the supernova-remnant argument was retired by Faulkner in ARJ in 2017 and is not listed.  A check, made for this article, of Faulkner's 32 retirements against Answers in Genesis's website: each one was tested against the contents of the topic page and its indexed articles, and all 32 are absent.  Of AiG's five astronomy-touching entries (the NASA missing-day hoax, an evaluation of a Star of Bethlehem DVD, "God Created Things to 'Look Old'", the flat-earth trope and geocentrism), not one is an argument Faulkner evaluated in either paper, so the two documents do not overlap at a single point.  The article cites it to show that Faulkner's audit and AiG's public list are not connected. ↩ ↩

Repp, A.  “Fifty-Seven Years of Creation Astronomy, Part II: Issues and Advances.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 59(2):81–91.  2022.  Page 87:  “On the other hand, acceptance of star formation almost forces consideration of how stellar development processes — with their Gyr.-timescales — fit into a YEC framework.  It seems safe to say that there is no consensus on this issue.”  The same page carries the verdict on the blue-star argument:  “Other objections seem nothing more than apologetic tactics.”  A survey of fifty-seven years of creation astronomy, written by a young-earth astronomer who is auditing the movement's own field.  The article uses it for the verdict that the creation side has no consensus on stellar development, and for the warning about the movement's built-in danger.  The paper appeared in the Fall 2022 issue. ↩

1. 14a.

   Page 83, column 1, section might any lessons be available from our own history?:  “This decided rejection of geocentrism raises the question of why no such notes were published three decades earlier.  One possible reason might involve the fact that early creation advocates were themselves continually challenging mainstream theories of neo-Darwinism (in biology) and actualism (in geology);  thus they might have been amenable to — or at least reluctant to object to — challenges to other mainstream theories such as relativity, electromagnetism, and heliocentrism.  If this analysis is correct, then the creation movement contains an inherent, built-in danger, namely, the temptation to give unwarranted credence to fringe theories as a result of our own rejection of neo-Darwinism and mainstream geology.  It is for this reason that the author feels it worthwhile to bring up this aspect of our history, for, if this is the case, we will continue to face this danger for the foreseeable future.”  Footnote 4 of the paper, attached to that last sentence:  “The author is keenly aware of how ironic this sentence will sound to anti-creationists — which fact does not, of course, absolve us of the responsibility to police ourselves.”  The history the paper describes is documented in the same section: attacks on relativity (Barnes 1971, 1973; Barnes and Upham 1976; Essen 1977; Slusher 1980; Bouw 1981), rewrites of electrodynamics (Barnes et al. 1977; Pemper and Barnes 1978; Barnes 1980, 1984), and geocentrism (Hanson 1978, 1981).  Footnote 2 of the paper records the falsification of one of them: Barnes and Upham's vector theory of gravity "did undergo falsification five years later, when Weisberg and Taylor (1981) calculated the gravitational radiation from the Hulse-Taylor pulsar to be within 15% of the GR prediction."  Pages 83–84:  The paper's own corrective principles, worth quoting against the venue problem this article documents:  “There is no such presuppositional bias affecting relativity, electrodynamics, etc.;  thus, if the authors of these articles indeed had a convincing case against standard physics, the appropriate publication venue would have been the mainstream literature, not CRSQ.”  And:  “in the field of astronomy, this presumption should breed great caution in consideration of alternative redshift interpretations — or of any far-reaching conclusions based on null results or marginal observations.” ↩ ↩

Creation Ministries International.  Arguments we think creationists should NOT use.  Feb 7, 2006.  A list, sorted into tiers, of creationist arguments that CMI says creationists should not use, with its reasons for each judgement.  Published 7 February 2006 and continuously updated.  The article uses it for CMI's own reasons for dropping arguments, for the astronomy entries, and for a comparison of the list over time.

1. 15a.

   Section Introduction:  “All theories of science are fallible, and new data often overturn previously held theories.  Evolutionists continually revise their theories because of new data, so it should not be surprising or distressing that some creationist scientific theories need to be revised too.”  “We don't claim that this list is exhaustive—it will be updated with additions and maybe deletions as new evidence is discovered.”  “It is notable that some skeptics criticise creationists when they retract doubtful arguments, but these are also the same people who accuse creationists of being unwilling to change their minds!”  “Persisting in using discredited arguments simply rebounds—it's the truth that sets us free (John 8:32), not error, and Christ is 'the truth' (John 14:6)!  Since there is so much good evidence for creation, there is no need to use any of the 'doubtful' arguments.”  A softening worth noting: the 2007 wording of that last point was stronger: "Persistently using discredited arguments is both ineffectual and, more importantly, immoral."  The moral charge was dropped. ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 15b.

   Section Tier 1, should definitely not be used:  The moon-dust entry says:  “these early estimates were wrong … So the dust layer thickness can't be used as proof of a young moon (or of an old one either)”.  The NASA "missing day" hoax is traced to Harry Rimmer's 1936 The Harmony of Science and Scripture.  The faked moon landings entry says:  “This NASA hoax claim is an example of where CMI reminds readers that we are pro-Bible rather than anti-establishment for the sake of it”.  Also in this tier are flat earth, a vertical pre-Flood axis, light created in transit, and geocentrism.  The missing solar neutrinos entry says:  “Therefore creationists should no longer invoke the missing neutrino problem to deny that fusion is the primary source of energy for the sun.  So it cannot be used as a young-age indicator—nor an old-age indicator for that matter”.  citing Newton 2002, J. Creation 16(3):123–125.  The canopy entry says:  “This is not a direct teaching of Scripture, so there is no place for dogmatism.  Also, no suitable model has been developed that holds sufficient water.  So all creationist geologists prefer a different model.”  Section Tier 2, doubtful:  c decay, and the gospel in the stars. ↩ ↩

3. 15c.

   Every entry present in 2007 is still present in 2026 and nothing was deleted, including all 24 non-astronomy entries checked.  Four astronomy-relevant entries were added: 'light was created in transit' (between 2007 and 2012), 'NASA faked the moon landings' (same window), 'the earth is flat' (between 2012 and 2018) and 'God's rainbow has seven colours' (after 2018).  Canopy theory moved from the 'doubtful' tier to the 'definitely not use' tier.  Three of the four additions are responses to claims arriving from outside the movement, a hoax, a folk cosmology and a folk claim, not corrections of creationist science.  Only 'light was created in transit' is the retirement of a genuine creationist scientific proposal. ↩ ↩

Answers in Genesis.  Arguments to Avoid.  n.d.  Retrieved Sep 1, 2026.  It has no tiering in the form of.  “definitely not use / doubtful”.  labels.  “No matter how attractive a 'favorite' argument is, no matter how 'perfectly' it seems to explain something in the Bible, if it does not hold up to scrutiny, it should be avoided.  Casting aside a flawed model is not the same as casting away Scripture.”  A topic hub page, not a list: it has no numbered entries, no tiering of arguments, and no dates for when an argument was retired.  Its four highlighted arguments are the Second Law beginning at the Fall, Darwin's supposed deathbed conversion, "if humans evolved from apes, why do apes exist today?", and "God created things to look old", and none of them is astronomical.  The article quotes its standing line as the organisation's own rule for retiring arguments. ↩

Institute for Creation Research.  Search of the ICR website for lists of arguments to avoid.  n.d.  Retrieved Sep 1, 2026.  The site does hold the full text of Andrew A. Snelling and David E. Rush, "Moon Dust and the Age of the Solar System," originally in Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 7(1) (1993), at https://www.icr.org/article/moon-dust-solar-system; its retraction sentence is the cleanest in the corpus and reads:  “It thus appears that the amount of meteoritic dust and meteorite debris in the lunar regolith and surface dust layer … does not contradict the evolutionists' multi-billion year timescale (while not proving it).  Unfortunately, attempted counter-responses by creationists have so far failed because of spurious arguments or faulty calculations.  Thus, until new evidence is forthcoming, creationists should not continue to use the dust on the moon as evidence against an old age for the moon and the solar system.”  The paper gives a named argument, a named reason and an explicit instruction to stop.  Their acknowledgements are quoted in the age of the solar system article (/unpublished-ai/solar-system-age/).  A search of ICR's own website, which finds no list of retired arguments.  Three phrase searches, "should not use", "arguments to avoid" and "no longer use" argument: the first returns no result block at all, the second returns ten hits, all Pauline exegesis on avoiding quarrels, and the third returns Milankovitch, junk-DNA and varve articles; nothing resembling the lists of Creation Ministries International or Answers in Genesis exists there, so the article cites it for the absence of such a list. ↩

Lisle, Jason.  “Ethical Science.”  Acts & Facts, Institute for Creation Research.  Jun 30, 2017.  “From time to time, people ask why the Institute for Creation Research doesn't use a particular line of evidence or a specific argument for creation. …  So, why don't we use it?”  His first reason is straightforward falsity:  “People sometimes repeat arguments we have found to be false, such as the myth that NASA computers detected the long day recorded in Joshua 10:12-14.”  His second reason, the standard the article quotes, reads:  “But the most common reason we don't use a particular argument may be the most misunderstood.  The evidence in question may be plausible but insufficiently supported at present.  If we are going to tell someone what to believe, it's not good enough to simply suspect or suppose that the premise in question is true.  We must know that it is true.  We must have a good reason or several good reasons for the belief.  If we don't, then it would be unethical to teach as truth something that only might be true.  After all, if something only might be true, then it logically follows it might be false.”  “Absolute certainty with scientific claims is usually unattainable, but we must at least have good reasons that show our position is very probable.  Furthermore, we must be ready to articulate those reasons.  Otherwise, we shouldn't claim our position as fact.”  “Some people feel that if they strongly believe something, then it's okay to present it to others as fact even if it's not well-supported by evidence.  However, this too would be unethical.  A strong belief in something does not make it true.”  A short magazine article by Jason Lisle, who holds a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Colorado and was ICR's Director of Physical Sciences, explaining why ICR declines to use some creationist arguments.  It gives two reasons: some arguments are simply false, such as the NASA missing-day myth, and others may be plausible but are not supported well enough to teach as fact.  The article quotes his standard that it would be unethical to teach as truth something that only might be true. ↩ ↩

Measured across four organisations on 1 September 2026.  CMI: a two-tier list of about 45 entries, 9 touching astronomy of which 3 are technical, carrying 2 of Faulkner's 32;  its most recent astronomy retirement, "light created in transit," was added between 2007 and 2012.  AiG: a topic hub of 24 articles, 5 touching astronomy of which 1 is technical, carrying 0 of 32;  its newest astronomy entry is a 2016 restatement of a 2010 hoax rebuttal.  ICR: no list;  0 of 32.  New Creation: a list maintained into 2025 with no astronomy category at all;  0 of 32.  No don't-use list at any of the four carries a single astronomy retirement made after 2012.  (The New Creation row is carried from the census in research/still-circulating.md and was not independently re-derived.) ↩

Klimchuk, James A.  “On Solving the Coronal Heating Problem.”  Solar Physics 234:41–77.  2006.  “The question of what heats the solar corona remains one of the most important problems in astrophysics.”  Page 1:  “There are no doubt many different heating mechanisms operating in the corona, and the real goal is to determine which one is dominant, both in general and in specific situations.”  From the abstract, the clause that matters most here:  “Whatever the detailed mechanism of energy release, it is clear that some form of magnetic reconnection must be occurring at significant altitudes in the corona (above the magnetic carpet), so that the tangling does not increase indefinitely.”.  That is a description of a system in steady state rather than one running down from an initial condition: convection tangles the field continuously, the tangling does not grow without limit, and so energy is released continuously.  The article does not soften Klimchuk's own concession, which is his first sentence.  It is also the number Faulkner asked for and nobody supplied.  Faulkner's source for his question is ¹.  He wrote:  “it is not accompanied by a calculation of the current cooling rate of the corona.  What if the cooling time for the corona is far less than a few thousand years?  If so, then even in the recent creation model there is a solar coronal heating problem.”  The coronal heating problem itself remains genuinely unsolved.  The live candidates are nanoflare reconnection and Alfvén-wave or ion-cyclotron turbulence, with the acoustic mechanism largely ruled out by SOHO in the 1990s.  It is, and there is.  Unsolved does not mean young, and here the unsolved problem is a problem for a young corona, since a created-hot corona would have cooled within the first week.  A review by the solar physicist James A. Klimchuk of the coronal heating problem, the question of what keeps the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, so hot.  Radiative and conductive cooling times for a typical coronal loop are of order 2,000–3,000 seconds, well under an hour, and the article uses that figure to show that a corona created hot would have cooled within the first week.  Mirror:  arXiv ↩

Ceragioli.  “The Debate Concerning 'Red' Sirius.”  Journal for the History of Astronomy 26:187–226.  1995.  A review of the debate about whether Sirius was ever red in antiquity.  It concludes that no known astrophysical theory can explain an anciently reddish Sirius, and it quotes P. C. Steffey's verdict that the 1960–1993 revival of the idea was a hoax.  The article uses it for the physics that rules out a red Sirius, and for the ancient witnesses who describe a white star.

1. 21a.

   Page 208:  Following Schiaparelli:  “these differences in appearance are the product of atmospheric absorption caused by the Earth.  Such absorption routinely causes white Sirius to vary in apparent colour (from white to reddish) even today, depending on the state of the atmosphere when it rises.  On the other hand, an intrinsically reddish star cannot show such a colour variation:  a white star can sometimes appear reddish in our atmosphere, but a reddish star cannot appear white.  So Hephaestion's description makes sense only if Sirius was intrinsically white in Antiquity.”  Cicero, De divinatione, records the same practice among the Ceans, who read health omens each year off whether Sirius rose "faint and misty" or clear (Ceragioli, pp. 209–210).  Page 219:  Ceragioli's own conclusion:  “there is no known astrophysical theory that demonstrably can explain an anciently reddish Sirius.  Of course, by now it should be obvious that we do not want one, because then what would we do with Manilius, Avienus and Hephaestion, not to mention the Chinese sources?”  Ceragioli also quotes P. C. Steffey's verdict on the 1960–1993 revival: "a hoax - as bad as Erich von Daniken's 'ancient astronauts'", perpetrated by "careless … popularizers" (Sky and Telescope 84 (1992): 246). ↩

2. 21b.

   Pages 203, 208–209:  Manilius, Astronomica 1.407-411, calls Sirius caeruleus, sea-blue, in G. P. Goold's translation:  “and the beams it launches from its sea-blue face are cold.”  Ceragioli writes:  “Manilius expressly calls Sirius 'sea-blue' (caeruleus), a poetic term that includes very light, bluish white shades of colour.  So for Manilius, Sirius could not have been reddish in Antiquity, but must have been its present bluish white.”  Avienus, Phaenomena 1373-1376:  “and when Sirius blazed with sea-blue star”.  Ceragioli notes the force of this at p. 209, since Avienus called many other stars reddish and had the vocabulary available.  The Chinese record has Sirius white throughout (Jiang 1993; Tang 1991).  Page 203:  On the selective quotation: T. J. J. See dismissed Avienus and cherry-picked Manilius,  “failing in the process to note that Avienus directly calls Sirius bluish white.” ↩ ↩

Uttenthaler, S. et al.  “The interplay between pulsation, mass loss, and third dredge-up: More about Miras with and without technetium.”  Astronomy & Astrophysics 622:A120.  2019.  Section 1:  “The longest-lived isotope that is produced in the s-process, ⁹⁹Tc, has a half-life of ~2 × 10⁵ years, much shorter than the stellar lifetime.  Absorption lines of Tc can thus be used to distinguish AGB stars that have produced Tc in situ and undergone a 3DUP event from those that have not.”  Section 3:  On extrinsic carbon stars:  “HD 198140, and IRAS 10151-6008 do not show lines of Tc. …  Hence, these stars are extrinsic carbon stars that owe their carbon enrichment to mass transfer from a now extinct binary companion.”  The third independent variable: technetium-rich and technetium-poor Miras separate cleanly in pulsation period against K−[22] WISE colour, a dust mass-loss proxy.  And the nuance that cuts the creationist's way:  “the Tc abundance in intermediate-mass stars may be slightly reduced because of the reduced effective half-life time of ⁹⁹Tc at temperatures in excess of 10⁸ K (Schatz 1983;  Mathews et al. 1986).”  Thermally enhanced decay makes the technetium vanish faster, not slower.  A 2019 study of Miras, which are pulsating giant stars, with and without technetium.  It uses technetium lines to separate asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars that made technetium inside themselves from those that did not.  The article uses it for two further checks that track the same divide between technetium-rich and technetium-poor stars, and for a nuance that makes the technetium vanish faster, not slower. ↩ ↩

Merrill, Paul W.  “Spectroscopic Observations of Stars of Class S.”  Astrophysical Journal 116:21–26.  1952.  Table 3, page 23:  Table 3 lists the Tc I features used: λ4031, 4238, 4262, 4297.  The inference:  “Lines of Tc I, an element believed to have no completely stable isotope, appear to be stronger in the stars with the more dominant S-type characteristics.  This fact, together with others, might suggest that S-type stars represent a comparatively transient phase of stellar existence.”  A 1952 paper reporting spectroscopic observations of stars of class S, whose spectra show lines of technetium, an element with no completely stable isotope.  It was received on 27 February 1952, from the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories.  The article quotes it for the inference that S-type stars may be a short phase in a star's life. ↩

Baron, F. et al.  “Imaging the Algol Triple System in the H Band with the CHARA Interferometer.”  Astrophysical Journal 752:20.  2012.  Page 1:  “State-of-the-art image reconstruction algorithms are used to image the full triple system.  In particular an image sequence of 55 distinct phases of the inner pair orbit is reconstructed, clearly showing the Roche-lobe-filling secondary revolving around the primary, with several epochs corresponding to the primary and secondary eclipses.”  Their statement of the paradox and its resolution is on the same page:  “As Algol A and Algol B are thought to have formed roughly at the same time, one would expect the more massive star of the pair to become a subgiant first.  However this supposition is contradicted by all observations …  The solution to this so called 'Algol paradox' is that most of the original mass from Algol B, which fills its Roche lobe, is thought to have been accreted by Algol A.”  Table 4, page 18:  Masses and radii, assuming a parallax of 34.7 ± 0.6 mas.  Faulkner's quoted figures, 3.5 and 0.80 solar masses, are the older Richards 1993 values, and Baron's revision to 3.17 and 0.70 does not change the argument either way.  Pages 1–2:  Independent confirmations they cite are VLBI localising the radio source on Algol B, the stripped and tidally locked star (Lestrade et al. 1993, confirmed by Peterson et al. 2010); giant X-ray flares on Algol B (White et al. 1986; Schmitt and Favata 1998); and the gas stream itself:  “H-alpha profiles provide evidence for mass transfer through a stream of gas from the Roche lobe of Algol B to Algol A (Gillet et al. 1989).”  Faulkner's own paper is in this evidence chain: Kaitchuck, R. H., Honeycutt, R. K., and Faulkner, D. R., "Spectroscopic and Photometric Observations of Transient Accretion Disks in U Cephei," ApJ 339 (1989): 420–433, with Faulkner's affiliation given as the Department of Astronomy, Indiana University.  A paper by F. Baron and colleagues that images the Algol triple star system with the CHARA interferometer, which combines light from several telescopes to resolve fine detail.  The team observed from 2006 to 2010 with four telescopes, through the Michigan Infrared Combiner, at better than 0.5 milliarcsecond resolution.  The article uses it because the images show the lighter star filling its Roche lobe, the region around a star within which its own gravity dominates.  Mirror:  arXiv ↩

van Hoof, P. A. M. et al.  “The Real-Time Evolution of Sakurai's Star (V4334 Sgr) and other (V)LTP Objects.”  Planetary Nebulae in our Galaxy and Beyond, IAU Symposium 234, 119–120.  2006.  Pages 119–120:  “Helium shell flashes punctuate the evolution of a star on the thermal pulsing Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB). …  Nearly all of these thermal pulses occur near the tip of the AGB, but approximately 20% of all low and intermediate mass stars are expected to suffer a final shell flash after they have left the AGB. …  if the star is already on the cooling track and the hydrogen burning shell has ceased, the remaining envelope can be ingested, leading to additional rapid hydrogen-driven burning.  This can result in an extremely fast real-time evolution following a double-loop structure in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (Herwig 2001, Hajduk et al. 2005).  Such an event is called a Very Late Thermal Pulse (VLTP).”  Three things in that paragraph carry the argument.  The fast evolution is model output, not an after-the-fact accommodation.  It happens to about a fifth of stars, so it should be rare among observed objects but not unique.  And it happens only after the star has left the AGB and reached the cooling track, which is to say at the very end.  Page 120:  “Very few VLTP events have been observed:  only V4334 Sgr (Sakurai's Object) and V605 Aql were discovered during their high-luminosity phase (respectively in 1996 and 1918).  CK Vul (in 1670) is suspected to represent a third case.”  The observed sample matches that prediction.  V605 Aquilae is described on the same page as Sakurai's Object's.  “older twin”.  , erupting around 1917 and now.  “very reddened and faint (V = 23 mag)”.  with a Wolf-Rayet spectrum.  Because two stars are running the same process a lifetime apart, the whole duration of the episode is bracketed by observation.  Faulkner discusses FG Sge, V4334 Sgr and V605 Aql in his 2019 paper and does not discuss V838 Mon anywhere in it.  A conference paper by van Hoof and colleagues on the real-time evolution of Sakurai's Object (V4334 Sgr) and similar stars.  It explains very late thermal pulses (VLTPs), a final helium flash that can happen after a star has left the late stage of its life called the AGB, and predicts that about 20% of low- and intermediate-mass stars will suffer one.  The article uses it because the observed sample is as small as that prediction, so the events are predicted rather than fitted after the fact.  Mirror:  arXiv ↩

1. 25a.

   Page 120:  “V4334 Sgr was the core of a previously unknown planetary nebula (PN) when it erupted in 1992.  In 2004 we obtained [O III] images using FORS1 on the VLT, and 8.6 GHz radio data with the VLA.  The old PN has been detected in both data sets.  This nebula is still visible because the O2+ ions did not have time yet to recombine.  Hence the nebula has a 'memory' of conditions before the VLTP.  Analysis of this spectrum showed that the old PN had already entered upon the cooling track (Kerber et al. 1999, Pollacco 1999).”  The passage says the eruption was in 1992, while p. 120's sample list gives the discovery during the high-luminosity phase as 1996.  Both dates are printed in the source, and neither is corrected here.  The other VLTP predictions have also been checked against this object: the new ejecta expand at about 350 km/s, the initial spectra showed C₂ bands and hydrogen deficiency, dust formed later and reddened the star to V = 23, and the hydrogen-poor ejecta were detected in [N II], [O II] and radio. ↩

Bond, Howard E. et al.  “An energetic stellar outburst accompanied by circumstellar light echoes.”  Nature 422:405.  Mar 27, 2003.  What matters here is that the discovery paper did not know what the object was and said so.  The outburst did not fit a nova, and the authors set out the problem rather than asserting a mechanism.  The resolution came three years later in Tylenda and Soker's "Eruptions of the V838 Mon type: stellar merger versus nuclear outburst models," A&A 451 (2006): 223, arXiv:astro-ph/0509379.  They rule out the born-again AGB explanation quantitatively, the same explanation that is correct for Sakurai's Object, because a thermal pulse raises the luminosity (p. 6, citing Wood and Zarro 1981, Vassiliadis and Wood 1993, Herwig 2000):  “only by a factor of 2-3 …  Thus there is no way to obtain an increase of ~10³ in luminosity, as observed in V838 Mon and V4332 Sgr, from a thermally pulsating AGB star”.  The discovery paper for V838 Monocerotis, by Howard E. Bond and colleagues, which reports an outburst that did not fit a nova.  The article uses it because the authors set out the problem rather than asserting a mechanism, so the discovery paper did not know what the object was and said so.  Mirror:  arXiv ↩

Tylenda, R. et al.  “V1309 Scorpii: merger of a contact binary.”  Astronomy and Astrophysics 528:A114.  2011.  Page 1:  “V1309 Sco has been photometrically observed in course of the OGLE project since August 2001. …  We find that the progenitor of V1309 Sco was a contact binary with an orbital period of ~1.4 day.  This period was decreasing with time.  The light curve of the binary was also evolving, indicating that the system evolved towards its merger.  The violent phase of the merger, marked by the systematic brightenning of the object, began in March 2008, i.e. half a year before the outburst discovery. …  For the first time in the literature we show from direct observations that contact binaries indeed end up by merging into a single object, as was suggested in numerous theoretical studies of these systems.  Our study also shows that stellar mergers indeed result in eruptions of the V838 Mon type.”  Seven years of pre-outburst photometry showing the orbital period shortening is as direct as this kind of evidence gets, and it is the reason V838 Mon can be taken off the table rather than merely explained away.  A paper by R. Tylenda and colleagues on V1309 Scorpii, a pair of stars orbiting so closely that they touch (a contact binary), which merged and erupted.  The team used brightness measurements from the OGLE survey, which has observed the star since August 2001.  The article uses it because seven years of measurements before the outburst show the merger happening, which is direct evidence for the class of eruption that V838 Mon belongs to.  Mirror:  arXiv ↩

Asplund et al.  “The Chemical Composition of the Sun.”  Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 47:481–522.  2009.  The base of the solar convection zone is at 0.713 solar radii (Christensen-Dalsgaard, Gough and Thompson 1991, confirmed by Basu and Antia 1997; see Howe 2009, Living Reviews in Solar Physics, p. 34), where the temperature is about 2.2 million K.  That is below the roughly 2.5 million K needed to burn lithium, so standard convection alone does not reach the lithium-burning layer.  The depth is a helioseismic measurement, not a model assumption.  Faulkner's statement, which is incorrect, reads:  “the convective zone of the photosphere extends down to the region where the temperature is at least 3 million K”.  Table 1:  The abundances themselves are not in dispute and are precisely measured.  On the scale where log N(H) = 12, the solar photosphere gives lithium 1.05 ± 0.10 against 3.26 ± 0.05 in CI chondrites, and beryllium 1.38 ± 0.09 against 1.30 ± 0.03.  Lithium is down by a factor of about 160; beryllium is not down at all.  Section 3.1:  “In the Sun, Li is depleted by about a factor of 150 compared with the already small meteoritic value”.  The mainstream answer to the resulting solar lithium problem is extra mixing beyond the formal convection-zone base, such as convective overshoot, rotational mixing or internal gravity waves, deep enough to burn lithium and not deep enough to burn beryllium.  That is a fitted mechanism rather than a first-principles one, and the article says so.  The argument nevertheless fails, because a photospheric abundance is not a core thermometer whatever the mixing depth proves to be, and because the measured lithium-versus-age relation in solar twins runs opposite to the claim.  A review of the Sun's chemical composition, giving the precisely measured abundances of lithium and beryllium in the solar photosphere (the visible surface layer) and in CI chondrites (a class of primitive meteorites).  The creationist premise is therefore correct and well measured, which is worth saying plainly before saying why the inference from it fails.  The article uses it for those measured abundances, and to concede the premise before rejecting its inference.  The depth of the convection zone, below, comes from other work, cited in the note. ↩ ↩

Eddy, John A., and Aram A. Boornazian.  “Secular decrease in the solar diameter, 1863–1953.”  Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society 11:437.  1979.  The abstract itself records that the effect.  “has generally been attributed to atmospheric effects or personal equation”.  and the effect is absent from the Italian data.  Three things in the abstract undercut the argument built on it.  The horizontal and vertical shrinkage rates differ by a factor of three, about 2.25 against 0.75 arcseconds per century, and a sphere cannot shrink three times faster in one direction than in another.  A meeting abstract, not a refereed paper, by the astronomers John A. Eddy and Aram A. Boornazian, reporting an apparent shrinking of the Sun's diameter between 1863 and 1953.  The article uses it because a creationist argument built on this shrinkage was carried for about fifteen years, although the abstract itself undercuts the argument. ↩

The modern limits, with the units handled carefully, because this is where an article can go wrong.  Eddy and Boornazian's figures are for the diameter;  the papers that answered them report semi-diameter.  Converting, their horizontal rate of 2.25 arcsec per century of diameter is about 1.1 arcsec per century of semi-diameter.  Against that:  Parkinson, Morrison and Stephenson 1980 (Nature 288:548) found a decrease of 0.14 ± 0.08 arcsec across the whole 250 years from 1723 to 1973 — a 1.75σ result, "marginally found";  Shapiro 1980 (Science 208:51) claimed 0.15 arcsec per century;  Sveshnikov 2002, from 4,500 archival contact timings between 1631 and 1973, found the secular decrease "did not exceed 0.06 ± 0.03" arcsec;  and the MDI null result gives an upper limit of 0.12 arcsec per century.  Eddy and Boornazian's rate is roughly ten times the modern upper limit, and Parkinson's total change over two and a half centuries is smaller than what they claimed per century.  These four numbers are quoted through Emilio, M., Kuhn, J. R., Bush, R. I., and Scholl, I. F., "Measuring the Solar Radius from Space during the 2003 and 2006 Mercury Transits," ApJ 750 (2012): 135, pp. 1–2 (arXiv:1203.4898, in the project source library), which is a refereed relay.  Parkinson et al. 1980 and Shapiro 1980 could not be obtained through the ADS gateway, and the relay is stated rather than hidden.  Emilio et al.'s own measurement, abstract p. 1:  "From the MDI transit data we find the solar radius to be 960\".12 ± 0\".09 (696,342 ± 65 km)." ↩

Wesson, Paul S.  “Olbers's Paradox and the Spectral Intensity of the Extragalactic Background Light.”  The Astrophysical Journal 367:399–406.  Feb 1, 1991.  Page 399:  “For most combinations of cosmological model, galaxy formation redshift and galaxy evolution, the expansion only reduces the intensity by a factor of about 3-4. …  Contrary to what is implied in some books, the latter is not resolved mainly by the cosmological redshift.  The darkness of intergalactic space is a result primarily of the finite age of the galaxies, in conjunction with other factors including the finite speed of light, and only secondarily of the expansion of the universe.”  Faulkner's own treatment is at ARJ 12 (2019): 346–347, where he sets out the four assumptions (average stellar size and brightness, uniform distribution, an infinite universe, and an eternal universe) and retires the argument:  “the successful resolution of Olbers' paradox is that the universe is not eternal.  Olbers' paradox is not a problem in a non-eternal cosmology, such as the big bang model.  Therefore, Olbers' paradox is not evidence of recent origin.”  He keeps one caveat worth keeping: questioning the infinity assumption is a second available resolution, and within the big bang model it is not settled whether the universe is spatially finite or infinite.  A theoretical calculation by Paul S. Wesson, of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and the Department of Physics at the University of Waterloo, of the light that fills the night sky from distant galaxies at the wavelength of 5100 Å, in expanding and in static model universes.  It finds that for most models the expansion reduces that light by only a factor of about 3–4, so the darkness of the night is mainly due to the finite age of the galaxies.  The article uses it because it gives the split between the age and expansion effects, and it agrees with Faulkner's treatment. ↩

Faulkner, Danny R.  “Are Old Supernova Remnants Really Missing? Re-Evaluating a Well-Known Young-Universe Argument.”  Answers Research Journal 10:245–258.  2017.  The creationist source is Keith Davies, whose fullest statement is "The Range of Sizes of Galactic Supernova Remnants," Creation Research Society Quarterly 43, no. 4 (March 2007): 242–250.  Section abstract:  The abstract opens:  “For more than two decades, recent creationists have used the supposed lack of old supernova remnants, and particularly the lack of stage three supernova remnants…”  Table 1, page 254:  Table 1 lists seventeen remnants past Davies' 7,000-year criterion, five of them over a million years old.  A 2017 paper by a young-earth astronomer that re-examines the argument that the galaxy has too few old supernova remnants.  It lists seventeen remnants older than the argument's cutoff, five of them over a million years old, and it discourages recent creationists from using the argument.  The article uses it as the retraction of Keith Davies's argument that the galaxy's missing old remnants point to an age of about 7,000 years. ↩

1. 32a.

   Pages 254–255:  Faulkner reports that Davies (1994, 181) "referenced six quotes from five sources supposedly in support of his contention that there is a serious deficiency of old SNRs," and checks them.  Faulkner does not report checking the sixth.  (1) The National Research Council 1983 report, quoted by Davies as.  “Major questions about these objects that should be addressed in the coming decade are:  Where have all the remnants gone?”  Faulkner supplies the next sentence:  “Radio, infrared, and x-ray observations in this decade should allow the discovery of other young supernova remnants besides the historically observed ones and Cas A”.  and comments:  “note that the concern was not for missing old SNR, but with missing young SNRs.”  (2) Longair 1989, 138, quoted as.  “Another surprise is how rare Crab Nebula type supernova remnants are.”  Faulkner's comment:  “It is not clear what the point of using this quote is, because the Crab Nebula is one of the youngest SNRs, while the topic of discussion ostensibly is old SNRs.”  (3) Clark and Caswell 1976, quoted as.  “Why have the large number of expected remnants not been detected?”  a question that, Faulkner notes, occurs late in the paper in a discussion of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds rather than the Galaxy, and whose next sentences answer it:  “Both anomalies are removed if we assume that the N(D)-D relation has been incorrectly estimated owing to the small number (4) of remnants used.”  (4) The same paper again, quoted by Davies as the bare fragment.  “The mystery of the missing remnants . . . .”  Faulkner restores the whole sentence:  “It appears that with the above explanation there is no need to postulate values of E0/n differing greatly from those in the Galaxy, and the mystery of the missing remnants is also solved.”  Faulkner's comment:  “Hence, rather than the authors expressing frustration at the mystery of missing SNRs, they instead expressed confidence that they had solved the apparent mystery.”  On the fragment itself:  “This is a sentence fragment, which raises questions about what the intent of the passage was.”  (5) Matthewson and Clarke 1973 is treated the same way, with the conditional clause.  “If equations (2) and (4) are correct”.  restored.  This is a young-earth astronomer, publishing in a young-earth journal, showing that a young-earth argument rested on quotations that say something other than what they were made to say.  That is both the best available answer to the charge that creationists never police themselves and the sharpest available warning about how these arguments get built. ↩

2. 32b.

   Chapter 8:  The source is Faulkner's book The Expanse of Heaven: Where Creation and Astronomy Intersect (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, first printing October 2017).  On Keith Davies (footnote 7 of the book cites the 1994 ICC paper):  “The creationist Keith Davies noticed a profound lack of old supernova remnants, suggesting that this is a good indication of recent origin.  While this looks promising, it relies upon a correct understanding of how supernova remnants evolve.  If the later stages of supernova remnants are not properly understood, then this indicator of recent creation may be suspect.”  Set that against the Answers Research Journal paper of the same year:  “Since SNR remnants with ages much older than 7000 years are known, the supposed lack of old SNRs probably is not a good argument for recent origin.  I discourage recent creationists from using it.”  The book carries a conditional caveat where the paper carries seventeen counter-examples and an instruction to stop.  The book's first printing is October 2017, and ARJ 10 is a 2017 volume with rolling publication.  The inference that the paper came first rests on the book's Appendix B having been added late to cover the 21 August 2017 eclipse, and is not established.  Either order leaves the same problem: the version a lay reader meets is the weaker one. ↩

Sellwood, J. A., and Karen L. Masters.  “Spirals in Galaxies.”  Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 60:73–120.  2022.  A review of the field by two astronomers, written for the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.  It surveys the observations and the theory of spiral arms, and it says the mechanism that makes spirals in simulations is likely the same one at work in real galaxies, although evidence to confirm that is hard to obtain.  The article uses it because its authors say plainly that classical density-wave theory is now beset with serious problems, and that the arms appear to wind up over time.  Mirror:  arXiv

1. 33a.

   Page 30:  The theory is the quasi-steady global-mode theory of Bertin & Lin.  “Consequently, the theory is now beset with multiple serious issues.”  The immediate cause is the Gaia DR2 phase-space substructure, which shows the local disk is not in the settled, well-mixed state that theory requires (§5.2.1). ↩

2. 33b.

   Section 8, page 43:  “The self-excitation mechanism in simulations of isolated, unbarred disk galaxy models is now established to be a recurrent cycle of groove modes (§5.1).  Individual modes, which have constant pattern speed at all radii, grow and decay, with each having significant amplitude for just a few turns at its corotation radius, while new instabilities develop to maintain spiral activity.  However, the superposition of several co-existing modes causes the spiral appearance to change rapidly and the arms to appear to wind up over time.”  Section 8, page 44:  On longevity, the same section says:  “The recurring patterns cause a secular increase in the random motions of stars in the disk, reducing its responsiveness to subsequent instabilities, and spiral activity in a purely stellar disk must fade over time.  However, spiral activity can be maintained indefinitely if the disk has even a modest fraction of gas, since gas clouds are able to maintain a low velocity dispersion through dissipative collisions, and form stars sharing similar kinematic properties, thereby maintaining the responsiveness of the disk.”  Section 5.1.1, page 28:  Quantitatively, spiral activity in a purely stellar disk.  “fades on a time-scale of some ten disk rotations”.  Converted to years, that is roughly 2 Gyr at the solar radius, but the activity.  “can persist 'indefinitely' if the disk is cooled.” ↩

3. 33c.

   Page 3:  In the introduction:  “it should be noted at the outset that we still lack truly compelling evidence that any spirals in real galaxies are caused by the mechanism that has been identified from the simulations.”  Page 28:  “A recurrent cycle of groove modes has been firmly established in simulations, but it is not easy to find evidence that it operates in real galaxies.”  Page 44:  Outstanding issue 3, in the conclusions:  “We still lack compelling evidence that the recurrent cycle of groove modes, which has been identified as the mechanism for spiral generation in simulations (§5.1), also works in galaxies.  The later releases of Gaia data may yield stronger evidence in the Milky Way, but additional evidence from external galaxies would be highly desirable.”  The article quotes all three rather than one. ↩ ↩

4. 33d.

   Page 32:  “winding spirals are predicted in all three of the other mechanisms discussed in §§5.1 & 5.2.”  This is the sentence that decides the matter.  The uncertainty is about which regeneration mechanism operates, not about whether arms wind up. ↩

5. 33e.

   Section 4.4.1.2, page 24:  “Historically, Ostriker & Peebles (1973) argued that massive halos stabilize disks against bars, which works because the swing amplification parameter X > 3 for m = 2 in sub-maximum disks, causing patterns having m > 2 to be favored instead.  However, this strategy also inhibits bi-symmetric spirals for the same reason, and there are a number of galaxies, M33 being a prominent example, that have dominant 2-arm spirals and no bar.”  Page 44:  In their conclusions, listing it as an unsolved problem in the direction opposite to the one Faulkner assumes:  “Simulations of sub-maximum disks do not manifest spiral patterns that are typical of most galaxies (§2.2) …  These shortcomings are shared by galaxy formation simulations that have not yet succeeded in creating thin disks that are cool and massive enough to support realistic spiral patterns.” ↩

Dobbs, Clare, and Junichi Baba.  “Dawes Review 4: Spiral Structures in Disc Galaxies.”  Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia 31:e035.  2014.  Page 1:  “We argue that, with the possible exception of barred galaxies, spiral arms are transient, recurrent and initiated by swing amplified instabilities in the disc.  We suppose that unbarred m = 2 spiral patterns are induced by tidal interactions, and slowly wind up over time.”  Section 2.2, page 14:  “Pioneering N-body simulations of the stellar discs by Sellwood & Carlberg (1984) have shown that spiral arms are transient and recurrent structures.”  The direct answer to the "maximum age of a billion years" version of the claim, on the same page:  “Recently, Fujii et al. (2011) performed high resolution three-dimensional N-body simulations of pure stellar discs, and suggested that the rapid disappearance of the spiral arms may result from a low number of particles in previous simulations.  Instead, they revealed a self-regulating mechanism that maintains multi-arm spiral features for at least 10 Gyr in a pure stellar disc. …  The arms are found to undergo a cycle — breaking up into smaller segments with typical sizes of a few kpc, then reconnecting by differential rotation to reform large scale patterns.”  A review of spiral arm theory in the Dawes Review series of the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, by Clare Dobbs and Junichi Baba.  It surveys the theories, the simulations and the observations of spiral arms, and its authors argue that arms are transient and recurrent, with the possible exception of barred galaxies.  The article uses it because the review's own abstract says that unbarred two-arm patterns slowly wind up over time, and because it reports simulations of pure stellar discs that keep multi-arm features for at least 10 Gyr.  Mirror:  arXiv ↩ ↩

Purcell, Chris W. et al.  “The Sagittarius impact as an architect of spirality and outer rings in the Milky Way.”  Nature 477:301–303.  Sep 15, 2011.  Page 1:  “Here we report simulations of the response of the Milky Way to the infall of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy (Sgr), which results in the formation of spiral arms, influences the central bar and produces a flared outer disk. …  Our results show that the Milky Way's morphology is not purely secular in origin and that low-mass minor mergers predicted to be common throughout the Universe probably have a similarly important role in shaping galactic structure.”  Faulkner cites this at ARJ 12 (2019): 345.  Note what "periodic" means in his summary: a satellite on a bound orbit returns, so the driving repeats, which is a statement that the structure has to be re-driven, not that it persists.  A simulation study by Chris Purcell, James Bullock and colleagues of how the infall of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy reshapes the Milky Way, forming spiral arms, influencing the central bar and producing a flared outer disk.  The article uses it as the third mechanism Faulkner names for regenerating spiral structure.  Mirror:  arXiv ↩

Pringle, J. E., and C. L. Dobbs.  “The evolution of pitch angles of spiral arms.”  Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 490:1470–1473.  2019.  Page 1:  “In Lin-Shu density wave theory, α stays constant in time, being simply a property of the underlying galaxy.  In other theories (e.g. tidal interaction, self-gravity) it is expected that the arms wind up in time, so that to a first approximation cot α ∝ t.  For these theories, it would be expected that a sample of galaxies observed at random times should show a uniform distribution of cot α.  We show that a recent set of measurements of spiral pitch angles (Yu & Ho 2018) is broadly consistent with this expectation.”  The prediction is the winding formula itself, turned into a population statistic.  A short theory paper by two astronomers that turns the winding of spiral arms into a test on a whole population of galaxies.  If arms wind up over time, galaxies seen at random times should show a uniform spread of cot α, and the paper finds that a recent set of pitch-angle measurements (Yu & Ho 2018) is broadly consistent with that.  The article uses it because it turns the creationist argument's own equation into a testable prediction.  Mirror:  arXiv ↩

Lingard, Timothy et al.  “Galaxy Zoo Builder: Morphological Dependence of Spiral Galaxy Pitch Angle.”  Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 504:3364–3374.  2021.  Page 1:  “We test a recent model for spiral arm winding, which predicts uniformity of the cotangent of pitch angle between some unknown upper and lower limits, finding our observations are consistent with this model of transient and recurrent spiral pitch angle as long as the pitch angle at which most winding spirals dissipate or disappear is larger than 10°.”  Section 3.3.1, page 9:  Their result:  “Testing the uniformity of cot φ_gal between 15° and 50° using a marginalized Anderson-Darling test results in rejecting the null hypothesis at the 1% level for just 5% of samples …  This result is highly consistent with the model for spiral winding proposed by Pringle & Dobbs (2019).”  Their own caveat, on the same page:  “This result suggests that our data are consistent with a cot-uniform source distribution for galaxy pitch angle, but the large uncertainty in φ_gal makes it difficult to make any conclusive statements.  This result is also highly sensitive to the lower limit of φ: decreasing it to 10° results in us rejecting the cot-uniform model at greater than the 0.1% level for 96% of the posterior samples.”  A statistical study of spiral pitch angles, measured from the spiral arm data of the citizen-science project Galaxy Zoo Builder, using a Bayesian model that gives each arm's pitch angle a full range of probable values.  The authors report that their data are consistent with a winding model in which arms dissipate at a pitch angle above 10 degrees, and they caution that the result depends on where the lower limit is set.  The article uses it as the observational test of the Pringle and Dobbs prediction, and it quotes the authors' own caveat about the lower limit.  Mirror:  arXiv ↩ ↩

Dillow.  The Waters Above.  1981.  Page 319:  His own calculation gives about 255 naked-eye stars visible through the canopy, against roughly 2,500 today.  Page 316:  A caution for anyone chasing this: the figure of 743 on p. 316 is a pre-elevation-correction intermediate and is not the result.  Page 321:  The Sun is rendered as a.  “reddish disc”.  Vardiman's founding canopy paper, which is the programme-level statement of the constraint, sorts the four candidate canopy phases by whether they would obscure the Sun, Moon and stars, citing Genesis 1:17, before any thermodynamics is done.  The star-visibility constraint is therefore the ICR canopy programme's own organising principle, not an objection imported from outside.  A 1981 book that made the case for the water vapor canopy, the proposed layer of water above the sky before the Flood, and its optics chapter works out what the sky would look like through that layer.  The article uses it because the canopy's own author calculated how few stars the sky would show through it, and the figure is the model's own. ↩

1. 38a.

   A 1981 book that made the case for the water vapor canopy, and in which Dillow computes the heat that condensing his own canopy would release.  The article uses it because the model's own author worked out the temperature rise and called it impossible.  Page 285:  Computing the latent heat released by condensing his canopy, Dillow gives a temperature rise of +1,623 °C.  His own verdict is.  “This, of course, is impossible.”  Page 288:  The 2,100 °C latent-heat figure, which Answers in Genesis's 2026 article cites to p. 272, is printed on this page of the 1981 edition.  Page 292:  His escape is to spread the release over a 478-day pre-Flood phase.  That is not a critic's calculation.  It is on the page, in the book that made the case for the model. ↩

Dillow, Joseph C.  The Waters Above: Earth's Pre-Flood Vapor Canopy.  Moody Press.  1981.  Page 234:  The cloudless radiative-equilibrium result for a 12.19 m (40 ft) canopy at 2.18 atm is 314 °C (597 °F), and Morton's gray-atmosphere model on the same page gives 2,142 °F.  Page 259:  The rescued figure, 293 K (68 °F), uses a hand-tuned cloud deck at 6 km with three coefficients that Dillow himself calls.  “somewhat arbitrary”.  A book that sets out the vapour canopy model, in which the pre-Flood atmosphere held 12.19 m (40 ft) of precipitable water.  The canopy's pedigree runs from John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris's The Genesis Flood (1961), on the "waters above the firmament" of Genesis 1:6-7.  The article uses it for the canopy's size, and for Dillow's own calculation that a cloudless canopy would be far too hot, which he then offset with a hand-tuned cloud deck. ↩ ↩

Oard, Michael.  “Published discussion of Pre-Flood Vapor Canopy Radiative Temperature Profiles.”  Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism.  1990.  Page 244:  Oard's discussion, on page 244, says:  “I applaud Mr. Rush and Dr. Vardiman for a detailed, scientific analysis of the vapor canopy.  Their approach is standard in climate modeling.  Unfortunately, for those who believe in a vapor canopy, the article poses some grave challenges.  Although the results are only the first step, it seems that two problems are apparent: either the surface is too hot or there isn't enough moisture in the canopy for 40 days and nights of rain.  A three-dimensional climate model with convection and clouds would help, but I have my doubts that it will solve the problems, because of the magnitude of the heating.”  A published discussion of the Rush and Vardiman paper, in the same proceedings.  Oard writes for readers who believe in a vapour canopy, and he says the paper poses grave challenges for them.  The article uses it because Oard names the two problems the paper raises: the surface is too hot, or there is not enough moisture for 40 days and nights of rain. ↩

Patterson, Roger.  “Did the Pre-Flood World Have a Vapor Canopy?”  Answers in Depth 21.  Answers in Genesis.  Mar 10, 2026.  Retrieved Sep 1, 2026.  Its verdict on the science is.  “As a scientific model, the fatal flaw with a canopy of water significant enough to contribute to the flood as the 'windows of heaven' opening is the heat involved.  The amount of water vapor described by Dillow would release enough heat to boil the entire atmosphere and much of the oceans (it can't rain with that much latent heat).  It also raises the surface temperature to hundreds of degrees through the greenhouse effect.  If the idea was developed to give the biblical account scientific validity, it hasn't met the task.”  On Vardiman's 2003 rescue, it says.  “While Vardiman left hope for the canopy to work as a scientific explanation, getting a 75% reduction in solar output with a thin layer of water really doesn't seem viable.  The sun doesn't have a dimmer switch.”.  Its standard is.  “We must hold tightly to the Bible but loosely to our scientific models.”  One locator note, because it cuts the other way:  footnote 22 of the article cites Dillow's 2,100 °C latent-heat figure to The Waters Above p. 272, where the passage in the 1981 first edition is on p. 288.  Page 272 is Dillow's Taylor-stability discussion and carries no heat calculation, and the likeliest explanation is the repaginated 1983 revision.  Answers in Genesis's current position on the canopy, which says creationists should drop the model.  The article works through the biblical arguments and then the physics, and it checks Dillow's own page numbers, and it is thorough.  The article uses it because Answers in Genesis has itself now rung the death bell on the model. ↩

The MacArthur Study Bible.  Word Publishing.  1997.  Patterson describes it as.  “one of the most widely distributed study Bibles available in multiple translations and languages”.  , and the point stands either way.  A study Bible in the New King James Version whose notes still teach the canopy at Genesis 1:7, Genesis 7:4, Genesis 7:11 and 2 Peter 3:5.  There is no page to annotate and no author to write to.  The article cites it because Rush and Vardiman published the canopy's numbers in 1990, CMI listed the canopy in 2006, Worraker wrote the peer-reviewed obituary in 2020 and Answers in Genesis rang the death bell in 2026, and a study Bible printed in the middle of that sequence is still teaching it. ↩

Genesis Park.  The Pre-Flood Atmosphere.  n.d.  Retrieved Sep 1, 2026.  The page quotes Henry Morris's Scientific Creationism (1984), p. 211, on the.  “vast blanket of invisible water vapor”.  , and then continues:  “Later the canopy would have collapsed in the form of rain (the 'windows of heaven' in Genesis 7:11), contributing to the Flood water, and resulting in the dramatic drop-off in longevity after the deluge.”  Its footer reads.  “Copyright 1999 – 2026 Genesis Park”.  .  One page that looks like a live defence is not.  Biblical Authority Ministries' "What Is The State Of The Canopy Model?" (18 April 2025) is a retirement piece, and it is counted here on the retirement side of the ledger:  “the current state of the canopy models have faded to such an extent that most researchers and apologists have abandoned the various models”.  An exhibit page on the Genesis Park website that presents the water vapor canopy positively at length, quoting Henry Morris, and extends it to explain post-Flood longevity.  The page has no byline date and no publication metadata, and its most recent citation is Oard 2019, so whether the canopy paragraphs were written or revised after that is not established.  The article uses it as an example of a retired model still presented on a live site. ↩

Sarfati, Jonathan.  “Exploding stars point to a young universe.”  Creation Ministries International.  Jul 20, 2011.  Retrieved Sep 1, 2026.  “There are actually only 200 second stage SNRs observed in our galaxy!  This is in the right ball park for Biblical creation, but is totally different from evolutionary predictions.  Evolutionists at present have no answer to the problem of the missing supernova remnants.”  “There are actually no third stage SNRs observed in our galaxy!”  “If the universe was really billions of years old, there are 7000 missing SNRs in our galaxy.”  The page still carries the strapline.  “Missing supernova remnants refute millions of years.”  There is no editorial note of any kind, and the word "Faulkner" does not appear on the page.  CMI retracted the neutrino argument on its own page in 2008 and annotated the moon-dust paper in 2014, so the ministry knows how to do this.  This page was last revised six years before Faulkner's retraction and has not been revisited.  A popular article by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, published on the site on 27 Jan, 2006 and updated on 20 Jul, 2011, which first appeared in the magazine Creation 19(3), pages 46–48, June 1997.  It argues from the number of supernova remnants (the expanding clouds of debris left by exploding stars) that should be visible in our galaxy, and says the observed count is totally different from evolutionary predictions.  The article uses it because the argument still stands on the ministry's site without any correction. ↩

Wile, Jay L.  “Moon Dust and the Age of the Solar System in the 21st Century.”  The Creation Club.  Dec 9, 2024.  Retrieved Sep 1, 2026.  The site files the page under the categories.  “Articles, Astronomy, Solar System, Young Age Evidence.”  The measurement he is discussing is Hollick and O'Brien's Apollo solar-cell result (Space Weather 11(11) (2013): 651–660):  “this provides the first direct measured long-term net accretion of dust with an upper limit of order 100 µg cm⁻² yr⁻¹, equivalent to a layer 1 mm thick in 1000 years, but it may be significantly less.”  Wile quotes that caveat himself, and also quotes Lawrence Taylor's objection in Science News:  “It's just too much dust…Nobody will believe it.”  The 2024 preface adds a further figure:  “an interesting paper reported in 2019 that they expect a rate of c. 1.4 tons of new dust collects on the moon every day …  when the time scale is as exponentially different as that of the deep-time scientist and the creationist, those numbers add up quickly.”  A 2024 article by the creationist Jay L. Wile, republished on The Creation Club site, where the page carries a bracketed editorial preface, [Originally published in 2014 as Will This Bring Back the Moon Dust Argument?].  He does not revive the argument: he recomputes the old inference from a newer dust measurement and rejects reviving it.  The article uses it because the site still files the retired argument under young-age evidence, even though the author rejects it. ↩

Mitchell, Tommy.  “Arguments Christians Shouldn't Use.”  Answers in Genesis.  Jul 27, 2010.  “Simply put, some arguments are wrong, even if what they are arguing for is ultimately right.  We would do a disservice to our witness for Christ by knowingly using bad argumentation—effectively bearing false witness—even if those arguments are used to support the truth of the Bible.”  “When we use a particular scientific model as part of an argument, we must remember that creation models are not part of God's Word and, thus, they are not infallible.  We must discern what is biblically necessary from that which, while perhaps supporting the Bible, is nonetheless simply a scientifically falsifiable model.  We must subject creationist claims to the same high standards of peer review we would demand of evolutionists.  Otherwise, using undocumented or doubtful evidences, logical fallacies, and models that are incompatible with Scripture may hurt our case and weaken our testimony, making us look foolish to those outside (Colossians 4:5–6)”.  His three kinds of failed argument are arguments based on inaccurate historical data, arguments based on scientific models that were attractive at one time but have since proved unsupportable, and arguments that are mere speculation from the outset.  “Some frequently used arguments are based on inaccurate historical data.  Some are based on scientific models that were attractive at one time, but have been found to be unsupportable after further analysis.  Some arguments are no more than mere speculation from the outset and should be avoided.”  A rationale article by Dr. Tommy Mitchell arguing that some creationist arguments are wrong even when the conclusion they support is right.  He holds that creation models are fallible and must meet the same peer-review standard that creationists demand of evolutionists, and he sorts the failed arguments into three kinds.  It is the rationale article for AiG's "Arguments to Avoid" hub, and the article uses it for AiG's own statement of why some arguments must be dropped. ↩ ↩ ↩

Repp, Andrew S.  “Fifty-Seven Years of Creation Astronomy, Part I: A Survey.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 58(2):104–112.  2021.  Page 106, column 2:  “In astronomy, this fact reflects the large number of articles dealing with the light-speed decay hypothesis:  of the 21 astronomy articles published from 1984–1992, 19 dealt primarily with light-speed decay, and the remaining two assumed it as a foundation.”  Page 107, column 1:  For the 1990 spike:  “Of these 15 total articles, 11 dealt with the light-speed decay hypothesis, with CRSQ holding a minisymposium on variable constants that year.”  Page 106, column 2:  Two further figures from the same paper bear on how thin the field is.  Faulkner.  “authored 23 of the 38 ARJ astronomy articles from 2013–2019”.  The paper also says.  “contributors holding astronomy doctorates constitute a small pool of individuals,”.  Pages 110–111:  and that the bulk of two decades' output comes.  “from three authors, namely, Danny Faulkner, Jason Lisle, and Ron Samec”.  A bibliometric survey, which counts creationist astronomy articles against those on biology, geology and palaeontology across four creationist publications: CRSQ from 1964, the Journal of Creation from 1984, the ICC Proceedings from 1986 and ARJ from 2008.  It is a survey rather than an audit, and the article uses its counts to show how narrow the creationist astronomy literature was.  The paper was accepted on 18 August 2021. ↩