Today’s New Reason To Believe

by Hugh Ross

Many opponents of the big bang creation model, both atheists and young-earth creationists, try to get around the now very compelling and overwhelming physical evidence in favor of this biblically predicted model¹ by picking apart the least understood and least well-determined components of the model. For the past hundred years, the limiting factor in determining the details of the creation story of the universe has been the inability of astronomers to establish accurate distances to stars, galaxies, and gas clouds. This limitation is most pronounced with stars in the process of forming. Young-earth creationists in particular have exploited this weakness to claim that, in the context of the big bang creation model, theoretical models for star formation are inconsistent with observations and, therefore, they justify their claim that star formation had completely ceased by the end of the six creation days of Genesis 1.

All cosmic distance measures ultimately are based on the plane geometry theorems taught in high schools. For example, if one knows the length of the base of an isosceles triangle, then measurements of the angles at either end of the base will deliver the distance to the vertex of the triangle. For determining distances to nearby stars, traditionally the base of the triangle has been the diameter of Earth’s orbit about the Sun (185,912,076 miles or 299,195,741 kilometers). Astronomically speaking, however, this base is so tiny that distances to even the nearest stars can be determined to an accuracy of no better than a few percent.

In 1989, the European Space Agency launched a telescope (the High Precision Parallax Collecting Satellite or Hipparcos) into an orbit high above Earth’s atmosphere. It was dedicated exclusively to making distant measures to stars. Unencumbered by atmospheric instabilities, Hipparcos enabled astronomers to determine distances to over 120,000 stars to an accuracy of between 1-10 percent.

This accuracy limit represents the best that astronomers can hope for with optical wavelength telescopes. Furthermore, because bodies in the process of developing into stars are heavily embedded in their parental gas/dust clouds, they are faint and inaccessible to precision distance measurement by either Hipparcos or ground-based telescopes. Thus, astronomers remained frustrated in their desire to detail the history of the creation of the universe’s stars, and especially in their desire to provide precise observational constraints on physical models for star formation.

Now a new instrument and new measuring method is rescuing astronomers from their collective frustration. A team of Mexican and American radio astronomers has demonstrated how the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) can generate distance measures of unprecedented accuracy. Moreover, they achieved this accuracy not only on stars where reasonably precise measurements already exist, but on the very objects where accuracy has been most lacking, namely objects in the process of becoming stars.²

While star-forming objects are heavily obscured at optical wavelengths, many are brightly visible at radio wavelengths. Another great advantage of using radio telescopes is that the Earth’s atmosphere disturbs neither the phase nor the amplitude information of the incoming radio waves. This lack of phase and amplitude information disturbance means that radio astronomers can link together ten large radio telescopes located throughout the United States (ranging from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands) to create an instrument with the equivalent resolving power of an 8,611-kilometer (5,351-mile) diameter telescope! By using the VLBA, the researchers achieved the ability to measure angles more than twenty times smaller than anything possible with the Hipparcos instrument.

The team achieved another leap in measuring accuracy by finding a way to use a bigger isosceles triangle. Instead of using the diameter of Earth’s orbit as the base of the triangle, they measured the speed at which another body was orbiting about the particular star-forming object they were studying. Since the laws of motion discovered by Sir Isaac Newton more than three hundred years ago state that the diameter of an orbit is proportional to the rate at which a body achieves its orbit, the team was able to use their measurements of the orbital period of a certain body to determine the diameter of that body’s orbit in kilometers. Thus, the researchers could obtain an additional enhanced accuracy by choosing star-forming objects that possess distantly orbiting companions.

So far, the team has used the VLBA and this method to determine distances to three star-forming objects in the Taurus Star Association. The precision in the distance measurements achieved was 0.39, 0.37, and 0.45 percent, respectively! This is all the more remarkable given that the three stars ranged from 420-480 light-years away from Earth. To put it another way, the accuracy achieved was about twenty-times better than previous attempts. The team has an ongoing research program that should deliver dozens more distance measures for star-forming objects.

Even with just the three measurements achieved so far, the team was able to reassure the astronomical community that their current models for the creation and evolution of the universe, galaxies, and stars are quite good and that their understanding of star formation was on the right track. The big bang creation model is more secure than ever before. But, more exciting still, is the prospect of future measurements yielding increasingly detailed models of creation and far better tests of cosmic, galactic, and stellar features for these models.

We at Reasons To Believe confidently predict that the big bang creation model that the Bible so eloquently described more than two thousand years before this discovery will pass these future tests with flying colors.

1. Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, 3rd ed (Colorado Springs, NavPress, 2001): 23-29.
2. Laurent Loinard et al., “VLBA Determination of the Distance to Nearby Star-Forming Regions. I. The Distance to T Tauri with 0.4% Accuracy,” Astrophysical Journal 671 (2007): 546-554; Rosa M. Torres et al., “VLBA Determination of the Distance to Nearby Star-Forming Regions. II. Hubble 4 and HDE 283572 in Taurus,” Astrophysical Journal 671 (2007): 1813-1819.