Boy, that brings back memories! I met that nice little equation in the last physics course I took.
Particle’s lives get lengthened that way as well.
1 Like
Yeah - that is a fun topic in basic science classes. Pressure cannot pull. It can only push. So we technically don’t “suck” water up a straw. It gets pushed up into our mouths as we remove the downward part of the push that would otherwise keep it at its lower equilibrium height matching the surrounding liquid. So we help atmosphere begin to win that ‘push-o-war’, pushing the beverage up into our mouth. Even Superman would not be able to suck hard enough to draw a drink up a straw on the moon. Because if there’s no air pressure to push it up, then there is nothing to remove from the straw to shift the equilibrium any! Nothing to suck out.
I love your graphic of the pressure gradient! I know that sudden loss of cabin pressure of an airliner flying that high (as they actually do!) is pretty instantly fatal for everyone on a jet. I’m not quite as clear how much of that drop is because of the lower pressure outside, and how much is caused by the Bernoulli pressure difference from the plane’s speed (which would then suck even more air from the cabin). But I suspect that if any of us suffered a sudden pressure change from 101 kPa down to 30 kPa (top of Everest), it would probably be fatal to us (just from sudden pressure drop alone, and before any asphyxiation has a chance to set in.) I.e. the only reason people (very fit ones!) can exist up there is because they’ve gradually gotten up there - living for many days all along that vastly reduced pressure gradient so they an acclimate. It’s bad enough for us (but far from fatal) just driving up a mountainside and we feel the same effect from our ears needing to pop. But it just fascinates me that on top of Everest, people are actually closer (on the pressure guage) to the vacuum of space than they are to normal air pressure where most of us live!
1 Like
I remember thinking that was ridiculous . . . until our astronomy professor gave us NASA’s data on the density of interstellar gas and set us to work it out.
1 Like
Elizabeth Mitchell, MD, wrote another AiG article concerning molecular jets, and it is as instructive of AiG duplicity as much as any understanding of jets.
Do Herbig-Haro Objects Herald Star Birth?
She writes, “Herbig-Haro objects, which look like tiny nebula, are named for two astronomers who studied a number of them about fifty years ago.” and these are the polar jets this thread has been discussing.
The troublesome paragraph to come is headlined “What Is It?”, concerning HH46/47 in particular, and references mainstream sources. The opening:
Opinions vary as to what exactly is happening to produce Herbig-Haro high velocity plasma jets. Some astronomers believe they could represent the “termination of the infall phase”
references a news release that no longer seems to link, but is an acceptable statement. She goes on…
Others think they are produced as material is ejected from a star’s core. Astronomers analyzing the ALMA images of HH 46/47 note that the process by which Herbig-Haro objects form “remains a mystery."
SAY WHAT? Is there a tussle with some astronomers suggesting material is ejected from a star’s core? What paper is being referenced here? Presenting from the AiG article footnotes…
H. G. Arce et al., ALMA OBSERVATIONS OF THE HH 46/47 MOLECULAR OUTFLOW
H. G. Arce et al., ALMA OBSERVATIONS OF THE HH 46/47 MOLECULAR OUTFLOW - Preprint
…which specifically catagorizes the object as “a low-mass Class I YSO” [ Young Stellar Object ], roughly meaning that it displays an early stage protostar spectra. This is straight up conventional classification. There is NO “others think” here at all. Mitchell is manufacturing a perception of controversy, dissent, and uncertainty where none exists. There is much discussion of the exact details of how material is swept from accretion discs into jets, but nothing contesting that star birth is involved.
As far as references to the “core” are concerned, these involve the devoloping protostar, and source of jets, which is very different from the shrouded nuclear furnace core of a mature star. Main sequence stars have a stellar wind and material ejections, but without accretion they do not exhibit jets. By ignorance or contrivance, Mitchell has played a word game here to suggest that there are scientists backing such jets arising from the inner core of mature stars. This is false, and in fact farce, but it is done is such a way that most laypeople will miss the slight of hand. It seems the creationist lens extends the “interpretation of the same data” to include blatant misrepresentation of the scientific literature.
2 Likes
That just matches the blatant misrepresentation of the ancient literature we know as the Bible.
I sometimes think of the YEC approach to scripture as textual Docetism, where the human side is minimized down to zero on occasion.
And that’s sad, because if the Holy Spirit was to ask how we would like some new revelation to be written, we’d want it in forms familiar to us, using our cosmological concepts and our literary forms – yet YECists can’t allow that the Spirit treated His ancient audience with the same respect that we would want.
Interesting! I don’t suppose we have anything beyond merely speculative “data” on what the density of inter-galactic gases might be? Because now I’m wondering if there is more mass in dispersed intergalactic gases than there is in all the galaxies!
[And I take it we’re only discussing baryonic matter here - not dark matter.]
1 Like
It’s similiar to something I read about the biomass of bacteria… but at that point it didn’t surprise me
Is this a question about whether the universe is full of gas beyond what is observable? 
The situation is quite different, especially for the cosmic voids - the empty space between filament streams of galaxies where gas densities fall well below one atom per cubic meter. I haven’t really followed it very closely, but voids have been studied for light and neutrino travel, where their relative emptiness has an effect.
1 Like
Boggles the brain! Such a low density - and yet … so many cubic meters! Which wins … the infinitesimal? Or the virtually infinite? It sounds like you’re suggesting infinitesimal prevails in this case. One of those intergalactic atoms could probably be traveling at nearly the speed of light, and still be fairly safe from ever colliding with another atom!
I think that may only be on the side away from the sun.
Given that I have seen that in several other places, like doing a single calculation of sedimentation rate for the ocean using values for whole ocean input and only deep-sea total sediment volume and ignoring the line in the abstract saying that the rate was much lower >2000 years ago, or ocean age calculations using only those isotope residence times that give a value in the 1000s of years range, it isn’t surprising.
2 Likes
Well, the publicity around the paper that kicked off this thread, reporting the JWST observation of aligned protostar jets in the Serpens Main molecular cloud, has caught the attention of AiG. Ken Ham has a byline response which they published a couple of days ago.
JWST and Star Formation—An Example of Observational vs. Historical Science
He starts with
this is nothing new . . . it’s just the latest chapter in the same rehashed star-formation story from evolutionists!
What is nothing new is that to Ham, evolutionists are Darwinists, and scientists are evolutionists.
Ham asks in house astronomer Danny Faulkner for an executive summary of the jets paper, and Faulkner concludes with…
A new JWST image of a region of the constellation Serpens thought to be the location of star formation shows the alignment of several jets from stars thought to be forming. If confirmed, this could be evidence of the recent, common origin of these stars. However, keep in mind that evidence could be interpreted in other ways too.
which should tell Ham that it is basically over for his campaign of stellar infanticide, but Ham does not get the message. God, he goes on, could have created them all spinning in the same direction, and the dust and cloud created together. Because why? Just because - that’s why.
Ham then goes to AiG staffer Rob Webb, who possesses a master’s in aerospace engineering, who likewise offers a non-committal but inspirational
when I look at images of the Serpens Nebula that show jets of material blasting away from stars, I see order, design, and beauty—and ultimately the glory of our powerful God and his handiwork.
But Ham’s biggest miss in this piece is his framing the inference of the observations as historical science.
did the scientists actually witness this supposed formation process? No!
These jets are spewing out material which comes from accretion onto pre-ignition protostars, in real time, in the present tense, as we speak. Therefore this is not historical, but is operational science. This has been known for ages, the spin alignment just adds another level of detail.
Also note that these images are static, meaning they don’t show any change over time.
True for these particular images, but separate Hubble images of stellar jet HH47 have been stitched together into a movie showing outward movement against background stars. But Ham would not believe his own eyes anyways.
2 Likes
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
4 Likes
I need to find the 1st grade lesson on this, but how cool!
It is an ironic inversion. The usual argument runs that science shows something is old, and Ham insists it is actually young. Then science demonstrates something is young, and Ham is all “no, it was created that way”.
1 Like
That was an interesting quote from Ron Webb. He is an engineer, rather than an astrophysicist, but it was almost like his comment was done in such a way that he avoided any real support of Ham’s comments, but made an comment that he could stand behind. So, their science authority made a theologic and inspirational comment, while their spiritual leader made technical comments.
1 Like
This 15 minute YouTube by Launch Pad Astronomy is a bit dated, but offers an well produced and accessible introduction.
1 Like
The evidence of protostar jets negates YEC arguments against stellar birth, but as such jets can be as young as hundreds or a few thousand years, in themselves they do not challenge the idea of a 6,000 years old universe. A similar process of an accretion disk leading to perpendicular jets, however, can also be at work on galactic scale, as matter falls towards a central supermassive black hole. Such jets can be far larger than the galaxy itself, totaling millions of light years, and display variation in structure which reflect the feeding history of the black hole and interaction with the intergalactic environment.
One example is NGC2663, showing diamond shaped shock structures.
From the paper Collimation of the kiloparsec-scale radio jets in NGC 2663
Each of the lobes extend from the center more than 300,000 light years and display detailed structures. There is no way this can be accommodated in YEC timelines, and YEC organizations generally keep it quiet. Followers who trust on AiG for science probably would not be even aware of their existence.
2 Likes
Even while YEC brushed off gravitational collapse in regards to star formation, for some time one of their favorite pitches was that gravitational collapse is what powers the sun.
Russell Akridge, PH.D. The Sun Is Shrinking
A creationist, who may believe that the world was created approximately 6 thousand years ago, has very little to worry about. The sun would have been only 6% larger at creation than it is now.
…The shrinkage of the sun greatly alters what we believe to be the energy source within the sun. The sun shrinks because of its own self-gravitational attraction. As it compresses itself, it heats itself. This heat is then liberated in the form of solar radiation, i.e., sunlight.
… there is plenty of gravitational contraction energy potentially available to account for all or a large part of the sun’s energy.
Anton Petrov just put out a YouTube covering the OP paper on the Serpens nebula
2 Likes