Cosmic Baby Boom Becomes Baby Explosion
There has been a trend in deep space astronomy to find more and more mature-looking stars and galaxies farther back in time (04/06/2005, 03/10/2005, 07/08/2005). That trend just doubled or tripled. An announcement in Nature1 (see press release by European Southern Observatory), a thousand galaxies were found at distances corresponding to estimated ages of 9 to 12 billion years, just 10% to 30% the presumed age of the universe. “To our surprise,” one team member stated, this is “two to six times higher” than previous finds. “These observations will demand a profound reassessment of our theories of the formation and evolution of galaxies in a changing Universe,” he said. Science Now quoted an astronomer who doubted the counts, but more out of disbelief than counter-evidence. The survey team remained confident that their numbers, arrived at by a “brute force” technique that avoided “prior assumptions,” are solid.
1LeFevre et al., “A large population of galaxies 9 to 12 billion years back in the history of the Universe,” Nature 437, 519-521 (22 September 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03979.
More and more structure earlier and earlier – does this sound like evolution or creation? Evolutionary biology has a Cambrian explosion. Evolutionary cosmology has a structure explosion. Creation has abrupt appearance intelligently guided and designed by an adequate cause. Explosions? We have no need of that hypothesis.