This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
(7th Edition) by Dr. Walt Brown. The online version of the book is designed to be read online.
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Have Planets Been Discovered Outside the Solar System?
Yes. However, this does not imply that planets evolve or that life exists on such planets. Quite the opposite.
The media and a few astronomers often fail to explain important aspects of these discoveries. From 1963–2000, false claims were made that planets had been found outside the solar system. Few details accompanied each report, so the general impression that planets evolve was reinforced and became textbook orthodoxy. Today, planets are being discovered, but a close examination shows that their existence contradicts current evolution theories, and almost all of their orbits create temperatures too extreme for life.1 Besides, hundreds of other requirements must be met, and life is too complex to evolve. [See pages 6–21 and “Is There Life in Outer Space?” on page 380.]
What were these false claims that planets had been discovered? In 1963, Peter van de Kamp announced that Barnard’s star wobbled, as if a planet orbited the star. In 1973, other astronomers showed that the telescope wobbled, not the star. In 1984, major radio and television networks reported that astronomers at Kitt Peak National Observatory had discovered the first planet outside the solar system. Other astronomers, after months of searching, could not verify the claim. Two years later, the astronomers who made the “discovery” acknowledged that atmospheric turbulence probably fooled them, because even they could not find their “planet.” In 1991, British astronomers reported that a star, named Scutum, wobbled with a six-month cycle. They claimed, and the excited media announced, discovery of the first planet outside our solar system. Later, these astronomers admitted their error. It was Earth that wobbled slightly, not the star.
On 19 May 1998, NASA announced, amid much fanfare, that the Hubble Space Telescope had made the first direct observation of a planet outside the solar system. An editorial in Nature criticized NASA’s premature announcement. “One does not need to read between the lines to perceive a deep need within NASA for publicity.”2 Two years later, the astronomer making the “discovery” retracted her claim.3 What she thought was a planet was a star dimmed by interstellar dust. Other false alarms involved astronomers, eager for publicity, who joined with the media hungry for an audience. Misinformation resulted. Unfortunately, the media rarely retracts reports that are later disproven, and textbooks, which change very slowly, have yet to catch up.
Several stars are surrounded by disks of gas and dust, which a few astronomers thought might be merging to form planets. Some of these astronomers also believe that finding such disks confirms the theory that planets evolve from gas and dust orbiting a star. Now it is known that on rare occasions the outer envelope of a sunlike star can be ejected into a disk-shaped cloud within a few years.4
Since 1995, an indirect technique that measures a star’s wobble, has identified several hundred possible planets outside our solar system. The light from a few of these wobbling stars also dims periodically, as if a planet is passing between the star and Earth, blocking some of the star’s light. Someday, telescopes may allow us to actually see planets outside our solar system.
How do these extrasolar planets contradict evolution theories? One planet has been found in a tight cluster of tens of thousands of stars that would disrupt the evolution of any planet. That cluster is also devoid of the heavy chemical elements thought necessary to evolve a planet.5 At least 30 planets have two suns; one sun of each pair would tend to disrupt any slow evolution of a planet.6 A Jupiter-size planet has been found with three suns! Its orbit is so close to one star (0.05 AU) that it would have been pulled apart before it could have evolved. Worse yet, two other stars orbit the first star at a distance of 12.3 AU. Their presence would also prevent the planet from evolving.7
Some relatively cool, planet-size bodies not associated with any star are being discovered wandering alone in deep space. Experts admit that, “The formation of young, free-floating, planetary-mass objects like these is difficult to explain by our current models of how planets form.” 8
To know if extrasolar planets have been found, we must first know what qualifies as a planet. The common characteristics of the solar system’s nine planets are our best guide. Therefore, we might define a planet as a nearly spherical body that is not itself a star, but is in an almost-circular orbit around a star that spins in the same direction as the orbiting body. A planet should be at least as massive as Pluto, which in many ways is our most unusual planet. [See “Is Pluto a Planet?” on page 25] Pluto provides other limits such as distance from its star (the Sun): < 50 AU, eccentricity: < 0.25, and angle of inclination: < 18 degrees. Most claimed “planets” outside the solar system are not in nearly circular orbits, many are closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun, few can be shown to orbit in the plane of the star’s equator, and none can be shown to orbit in the direction of the star’s spin. Few, if any, resemble planets in the solar system.
Two aspects of these new, more valid discoveries have gone largely unnoticed. First, how is the orbital plane of the orbiting body oriented? If the orbital plane is parallel to our line of sight to the star, then the orbiting body is small enough to be a planet and still cause the “wobble” we see. However, if the plane is nearly perpendicular to our line of sight, a much more massive body is needed to cause the observed wobble. Some bodies are probably so massive that they are brown dwarfs—small dim stars, some only 5–8 times larger than Jupiter. Most stars orbit other stars. A brown dwarf can also orbit another star, so brown dwarfs could cause some of the observed wobbles. The dividing line between brown dwarfs and planets is uncertain and involves more than just mass, because their sizes can overlap9—another reason for defining planets.
Second, if the unseen bodies are planets, then some are so near their star that they are losing mass too rapidly to have been planets for very long.10 Furthermore, their rocky cores would have melted before the planet’s evolution could begin.11 Others are too far from their star and the dust near the star needed to grow a planet. Also, their slow motion at those great distances would “scoop up” little dust. If planets evolved, friction from the gas and dust around a young star would have circularized each planet’s orbit. As stated above, most of the claimed planets have highly elliptical orbits.
Finally, some bodies orbiting stars may be a new class of object—neither planets nor brown dwarfs. Techniques are being developed that will shed more light on these bodies. What is clear is that for the nine planets we know best and for the extrasolar planets, evolutionary explanations are completely inadequate.12