This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, 8th Edition (2008), by Dr. Walt Brown. It is designed to be read online.
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49. Evolution of the Solar System?
Evolutionists claim that the solar system condensed out of a vast cloud of swirling dust about 4,600,000,000 years ago. If so, many particles that were not swept up as part of a planet should now be spiraling in toward the Sun. Colliding asteroids also would create dust particles that, over millions of years, would spiral in toward the Sun. (To understand why, see “Poynting-Robertson Effect” on page 39.) Particles should still be falling into the Sun’s upper atmosphere, burning up, and giving off an easily measured infrared glow. Measurements taken during the solar eclipse of 11 July 1991 showed no such glow.a So, the assumed “millions of years” and this explanation for the solar system’s origin are probably wrong.
Disks of gas and dust surround some stars. That does not mean planets are forming in those disks. Some disks formed from matter suddenly expelled from the star.b Other disks formed from impact debris or other matter near the star. Early astronomers called the disks planetary nebula, because they mistakenly thought they contained evolving planets.