Most powerful star explosion ever seen
The world of astronomy places many creationists in an uncomfortable position. The universe is only 6000 years old but the light from distant stars can be 14 billion years old by the time it reaches us. How can we reconcile this seemingly impossible difference?
When astronomers paint the picture of the universe, they start with 14 Billion years. They also start with the earth not being a very special place. It is an ordinary planet around an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy. In other words – it is ordinary. They also tell of the quantum singularity from which all matter and energy came. And they know everything that happened from 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang to today – from an astrophysics point of view, that is. Pretty impressive to say the least. But they have had to make many assumptions and they do not like supernatural occurrences. Unfortunately for them, the quantum singularity – the means that matter and energy pop into existence – only exists in their theories. In fact, the quantum singularity is a supernatural occurrence.
Alas, astrophysicists are in the same boat creationists are when it comes to proving the origins of the universe. And since we can never go back in time to the beginning, we will never truly be able to know exactly how God did it. There are some theories on the creationist side as to how God could have done it. There is a book in the CCCS library by Dr. Russell Humphries called “Starlight and Time.” It is his stab at a theory that could explain how God created everything and how things can still appear to be billions of years away. If you have the chance to look it over, particularly chapters one and two, it will give you a good idea on the overview of the theory. Chapter three is more of the mathematical nuts and bolts, and unless you understand the Calculus, you may want to avoid it.
We will not know how God created until we meet Him in Heaven. But until then, we can be sure that evolutionists and creationists do not have all (or any, really) of the answers. But we do need to be able to put up a defense of our faith (1 Peter 3:15) and to be able to do that, we do need to understand the attacks of the other side and how to counter them. Assumumptions in the following article are in redand my comments are in blue.
Most powerful star explosion ever seen
By Miriam Kramer
Published May 08, 2013
Space.com
NASA space telescopes have captured what appears to be the most powerful star explosion ever detected, a cosmic event so luminous that scientists dubbed it “eye-wateringly bright” despite being 3.6 billion light-years from Earth.
On April 27, NASA’s Swift Space Telescope and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope spotted the highest-energy gamma-ray burst (GRB) — an explosion of a massive star in the last stage of its life — ever before seen.
NASA scientists combined the observations into a video animation of the historic gamma-ray burst to illustrate the surprising brightness of this star explosion.
“We have waited a long time for a gamma-ray burst this shockingly, eye-wateringly bright,” Julie McEnery, a project scientist for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope at NASA’s GoddardSpaceFlightCenter in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. “The GRB lasted so long that a record number of telescopes on the ground were able to catch it while space-based observations were still ongoing.”
One of the gamma-rays emitted during the eruption — seen in the constellation Leo — was three times more energetic than any other gamma-ray burst recorded by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT), the instrument on the spacecraft responsible for detecting these kinds of explosions.
The gamma-ray burst (named GRB 130427A) was also the longest ever recorded, NASA officials said.
“The GeV [energy] emission from the burst lasted for hours, and it remained detectable by the LAT for the better part of a day, setting a new record for the longest gamma-ray emission from a GRB,” NASA officials added.
Gamma-ray burstsare the brightest explosions yet observed in the universe.
“Astronomers think most [gamma-ray bursts] occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse under their own weight,” NASA officials said in a statement. “As the core collapses into a black hole, jets of material shoot outward at nearly the speed of light.”
Swift’s detection of this burst was delayed. The satellite was moving between cosmic targets at the time of the eruption, but the spacecraft captured the explosion less than a minute after it began. Swift also aided astronomers in placing the gamma-ray burst closer to Earth than most other star explosions of its kind, NASA officials said. (Some of the wording in this article concerns me a bit and here is a perfect reason. If the satellite missed the beginning because it was moving from one place to another, how do they know the burst started less than a minute earlier? I would have liked them to have said there was another detector somewhere which just happened to be looking this way when the burst arrived.)
“This GRB is in the closest 5 percent of bursts, so the big push now is to find an emerging supernova, which accompanies nearly all long GRBs at this distance,” Goddard’s Neil Gehrels, principal investigator for Swift, said in a statement.
Scientists are hoping to find a supernova within the area of the explosion in order to trace the gamma-ray burst back to its origins. (This would be good evidence of what they think happens – a gamma ray burst, a collapse and then explosion of the remaining star material into a nova. If they do not find a nova, then their theory is incorrect. However, they did indeed find a nova, helping them to have a better understanding of dying stars. However, this understanding still does not help them explain a 14Byo universe. )
Observatories on the ground are keeping an eye on GRB 130427A’s area of the sky to locate the supernova by mid-May.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/05/08/star-explosion-is-most-powerful-ever-seen/