Comet Test for Creation Models

TNRTB Archive – Retained for reference information

New measurements by astronomers have provided another refutation of a recent prediction made by young-earth creationists while confirming a contravening prediction made by old-earth creationists. Specifically, young-earth creationist organizations have predicted that astronomers will never find any evidence for a huge cloud of comets and asteroids in the outer solar system or in the outer reaches of any other planetary system that could explain a population of short-period comets persisting for billions of years close to the Sun or any other star. Not only have astronomers found extensive evidence for such distant comet clouds in the solar system (the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud), but also they now have established the existence of such distant clouds around many young stars and at least six solar-type stars that are of the same approximate age as the Sun (about four billion years old). Thus, an important prediction of the old-earth creationist model has been vindicated while the corresponding young-earth creationist prediction has been refuted again.

• Ron Cowen, “Disks of Dust,” Science News 166 (2004), 372-73.
• https://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041211/toc.asp
• D. R. Ardila et al., “A Resolved Debris Disk Around the G2V Star HD 107146,” Astrophysical Journal Letters (2005), in press.
• https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0411422
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