What appears to be a solar system in the process of formation has been imaged by the newly commissioned Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope (see Fig. 1).1 The ALMA telescope, located
What appears to be a solar system in the process of formation has been imaged by the newly commissioned Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope (see Fig. 1).1 The ALMA telescope, located 5,000 meters up in the Andes of northern Chile, on the Chajnantor plateau in the Atacama Desert, consists of 66 mobile radio-astronomy dishes, which can be spaced up to 16 kilometers (10 miles) apart. This effectively combines their power into one 16-km-wide telescope which results in detailed images never before achieved. The telescope’s submillimeter wavelength resolution allows it to see through the clouds of dust that obscure it from sight in visible light images. Future improvements to the facility are expected to more than double its resolution.
This leaves us asking questions. Have planets been imaged while forming around young stars? Have protoplanetary systems—as they are called—actually been observed while the formation process is happening? If so, how do they fit into the biblical creationist worldview? According to the latter God created the stars on Day 4 of Creation Week about 6000 years ago (as measured by Earth’s clocks).
From a biblical creationist perspective then, the issue of both star and planet formation is not so much that we are seeing the process via our telescopes today, but whether the process is occurring naturalistically,2 without the creative hand of God.
However, the stunning significance of the ALMA image (Fig. 1) is that it almost exactly matches what secular astrophysicists had long predicted a solar system should look like during the early stages of its formation. An article in Sky & Telescope, November 6th, 2014, reported,
“An ALMA submillimeter-wavelength image unveils the dawn of planet formation around a surprisingly young star in unprecedented detail.”1 (emphasis added)
One important element missing from this image (Fig.1) is the planets themselves, or at least the planetesimals,3 which are allegedly their precursors. Another important missing element is the cloud of gas and dust that allegedly surrounds it all and obscures it from view in visible light. The ALMA telescope is able to see through this dust to obtain the image. But a much wider view, taken in the visible part of the spectrum, with the Hubble telescope, shows what it looks like (Fig. 2).
So what is it exactly that we are looking at in Fig. 1? Is it really a new-born star and proto-planetary system caught on-camera in the process of formation? Does this evidence support the evolutionary worldview by demonstrating beyond doubt that stars and planets can form via naturalistic processes? Or are there other explanations?
As biblical creationists, we are really left with just two questions:
- What can we learn from planetary systems?
- What story-telling is told to support the evolutionary worldview?
We need to be cautious about anything at all that we might say about this new image. Science makes progress only by studying repeatable events, making comparisons between them, developing generalizations (hypotheses) about them, and using those hypotheses to predict the expected outcomes of new observations.
The study of origins in secular astronomy is fundamentally uniformitarian in nature.5 Astrophysicists are limited to what they can find to test their hypotheses. What they do is like ‘stamp collecting’—if you find a lot the same you say it is common, if you don’t you say it is rare. And because they are largely locked into the evolutionary big bang paradigm, they are looking for systems at different evolutionary stages. That is very much analogous to the fossil record and ‘seeing’ the supposed evolutionary stages therein. The investigators’ bias heavily influences their interpretation of the evidence at hand.
Because Fig. 1 is the first-of-a-kind image it would be prudent to wait until more similar objects are detected before making any generalizations anyway. To illustrate the problem, the biggest obstacle to anyone developing useful hypotheses about universes is that we only have one of them (the so-called ‘cosmic variance’ problem). In contrast, there are lots of galaxies, stars, and planets that we can study, but this is the first time that we have seen what looks like a newly-forming solar system.
To properly interpret Fig. 1, however, we need to understand the theory behind planetary disk formation.
The Sky & Telescope (2014) report stated that,1
“The smallest gaps in the protoplanetary disk occur around 20 to 30 a.u. and near 70 a.u. Although no planets are detected at these wavelengths, the gaps are most likely the markers of a planet’s passage through the disk.” (emphasis added)
The discovery of disk gaps around a star supposedly less than one million years old is surprising—planets aren’t supposed to form so fast under naturalistic uniformitarian processes. No, they are meant to take up to 10