Young Solar System Evidence Pops Up Everywhere
If the solar system formed more recently than believed, Darwinism is dead. Look how widely scattered the evidence is.
Dunes, glaciers, and convection cells in Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia
Pluto
Recent cryovolcanism in Virgil Fossae on Pluto (Icarus). Distant Pluto has no reason to be young. There are no forces known to make it active. Scientists expected a dead world until New Horizons flew past it in 2015. Ammonia “lava” has been found in one region, but it’s not the only site of relatively recent activity.
- Because NH3 in its various forms is susceptible to destruction by UV photons and charged particles, its presence suggests emplacement on Pluto’s surface sometime in the past billion years.
- In addition to the debouchment of cryolava along fault lines in Virgil Fossae, fountaining from one or more associated sites appears to have distributed a mantling layer covering a few thousand square kilometers.
Keep in mind that Pluto was expected to be 4.5 billion years old. Even if the cryovolcanism were a billion years old, that approaches the last 1/5th of the time Pluto was thought to exist. What happened in the other 4/5ths, such that volcanic activity turned on in the last 20% of its existence? Also, “sometime in the past billion years” could be far more recent; the speculative estimate is based on assumptions about the amount erupted and the rate of destruction.
Titan’s theoretical interior (NASA).
Saturn: Titan
Titan has a belt of ice 6300 kilometres long that shouldn’t be there (New Scientist). There should not be fresh ice on the surface of Titan, because 4.5 billion years is a very long time for it to be covered up by molecules raining down from the atmosphere. Yet planetary scientists found a huge amount of it from Cassini data.
Titan has a huge ice belt near its equator, and we don’t know how it got there. Most of the surface is covered in organic sediment that constantly rains from the sky, but one corridor 6300 kilometres long – about 40 per cent of the frigid moon’s circumference – seems to be bare ice.
Jupiter: Europa
Ultraviolet observation of Enceladus’ plume in transit across Saturn, compared to Europa (Icarus). The plumes of Saturn’s little moon Enceladus are well-known, but those at Jupiter’s second Galilean moon Europa, one of the smoothest objects in the solar system, were discovered only recently. This paper calculates that Europa is emitting water two orders of magnitude more than Enceladus!
Europa (top) compared to Earth and Mars.
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is known to have a water vapor plume erupting from fissures across its south polar region. The plume was detectable in an observation of Enceladus transiting Saturn by Cassini’s Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS), but only at 1216 Å (Lyman alpha). Jupiter’s moon Europa also may have multiple water vapor plumes, detected via similar ultraviolet observations of Europa transiting Jupiter (after being discovered via emission features) by Hubble Space Telescope. Comparison of the UVIS Enceladus transit observation to published Europa transit results reveals that Europa’s plumes have very different properties than Enceladus’ plume using the same observational technique. For example, the mass of water expelled is two orders of magnitude less at Enceladus compared to Europa.
If Enceladus causes headaches for belief in an old solar system, how much more Europa, erupting a hundred times as much – to say nothing of its neighbor Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system?
Mars
How much of the sediment in Gale crater’s central mound was fluvially transported? (Geophysical Research Letters). When JPL aimed the Curiosity rover at Gale crater, they expected to find evidence of a watery flood in Mars’s past, because a mound of layered sediments in the crater were evident from orbit. Instead, the crater appeared very dry. This paper concludes that most of the sediments were not brought in by water, but by wind:
Curiosity artwork (NASA/JPL)
The origin of the sedimentary mound within Gale crater, the landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, remains enigmatic. Here we examine the total potential contribution of fluvial [flowing] material by conducting a volume‐based analysis. On the basis of these results, the mound can be divided into three zones: a lower, intermediate, and upper zone. The top boundary of the lowermost zone is defined by maximal contribution of water‐lain sediments, which are ~13 to 20% of the total mound volume. The upper zone is defined by the elevation of the unbreached rim to the north (–2.46 km); sediments above this elevation cannot have been emplaced by flowing water. These volume balance calculations indicate that mechanisms other than flowing water are required to account for the overwhelming majority of the sediments transported into Gale crater. The most likely candidate process is settling from eolian [wind-borne] suspension.
Mars has a lot of wind and a lot of sand. It would not require billions of years to deposit it. Notice that they speak of the “total potential contribution” by water; that’s an upper limit.
Moon
The space rock that hit the moon at 61,000 kilometers an hour (Royal Astronomical Society).
Observers watching January’s total eclipse of the Moon saw a rare event, a short-lived flash as a meteorite hit the lunar surface. Astronomers now think the space rock collided with the moon at 61,000 kilometers an hour, excavating a crater 10 to 15 meters across.
Impacts are to be expected from our knowledge of objects crossing Earth’s orbit, but how often do they impact the moon? The number of impact flashes observed in human history, which is quite a lot, has to be extrapolated over the assumed age of the solar system.
Credit: Illustra Media
How Did the Moon End Up Where It Is? (Live Science). News watchers may find it amusing how believers in the consensus age have to tweak parameters to keep the moon old. The Darwin family gets implicated in this storytelling:
The detailed mathematics that describe this evolution were first developed by George Darwin, son of the great Charles Darwin, in 1880. But his formula produces the opposite problem when we input our modern figures. It predicts that Earth and the moon were close together only 1.5 billion years ago. Darwin’s formula can only be reconciled with modern estimates of the moon’s age and distance if its typical recent recession rate is reduced to about one centimetre per year.
The solar system owes no obligation to planetary scientists’ opinions about the ages of things. It is what it is.
If scientists followed the evidence where it leads, they would not believe that the solar system is 4.5 billion years old. That value was decided decades ago in order to give Darwin time to evolve people from bacterial ancestors. Then they found some lucky meteorites that gave them the value they liked. That has become the standard date set in stone, from which they will not be moved by contrary evidence (see 23 April 2019).
“The great” Charles Darwin. Good grief. Now read this.