Starlight Within a Young Universe

The Kuiper Belt is that HUGE reservoir for short-period comets, and it's been observed to the tune of about a thousand objects. All the objects observed so far are maybe 100km or larger in diameter - they're COAL BLACK and about four billion kilometers away, so that even the 2000km diameter ones take astoundlingly sensitive equipment to find 'em. The size distribution of the ones we have found is similar to the size distribution of the thousand main-belt asteroids that were known by 1920 or so: a few big, more medium, lots of smallish.In the last twenty years - during which all the Kuiper Belt objects were discovered - another 100,000 or so main-belt asteroids have been found. They have a size distribution, too: oodles of tiny ones and scads and bunches of itsy-bitsy ones. The size distribution follows the equation that describes the first thousand. The Itsy-Bitsys are as faint as the Smallish KBO's.This means that we can't see the small objects in the Kuiper Belt with current technology - they're too dim. It means that we can make the reasonable inference that there are Smalls, Littles, Tinies, and Itsy-Bitsies out there, because there's nothing to keep the known KBO size distribution from continuing to those sizes. And this is borne out by our seeing stray Tinys and such that we refer to as short-period comets.We have yet to see our first Oort Cloud object - they're fifty times as far away as Kuipers. But we see long-period comets from there.

But there are no "quantized" redshifts - that was an artefact of small sample size. I'll get you the reference when I get home this evening.

Linky: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0208/0208117.pdfThe abstract:

Does he have a mechanism that converts all that oxygen in his water to hydrogen and helium? Does he have any reason beyond a couple of Bible verses for the astonishing ad hoccery of having water there at all?

How thick is this wall? What's its total mass?I'll bet that if it's over two molecules thick it'll outweigh the rest of the universe combined. And it won't be a real strong wall, either.

And that's exactly what is used as the baseline in annual parallax measurements! We know pretty dang precisely where the earth is in its orbit every day and minute of the year - heck, Bessel knew pretty closely back in 1838 when he measured one of the first parallaxes. And two angles are enough to define any triangle, as all triangles' internal angles sum to 180 degrees. The few thousands of stars that have had parallaxes measured really are up to hundreds of light-years away.There's a galaxy called Messier (mess-ee-ay, for a Frenchman who cataloged it) 106 that's had it's distance measured as 25,000,000 light years by a differenr geometric method: it has a disk of hot matter rotating near its core. The disk has "knots" of radio emission that can be tracked with great accuracy over years of radiotelescope observation. The speed of rotation of the disk can also be measured by the redshift on the side receding from us and the blueshift on the side approaching - just like the traffic cop measures your speed. The margin of error of the measurement overall is +/- 4%, or a million light years.We also know that stars are far away just from their brightness: nobody seems to think that the taillights of that receding semi get dim because the truck turns into a Tonka toy when it gets a quarter-mile away from you. Slow, yes. Speed up, no.

Indeed. But neutrons can get into that lattice as if it were vacuum, and make carbon-14 out of carbon-13 (present at 1.1% in earth-bound carbon) or nitrogen-14 (present in variable amounts in most diamonds.) And it takes only a smidgen of 14C to get the "ages" AiG reports. Note that they didn't report nitrogen content or provenance (with respect to possible neutron sources like uranium ore) of any of their coals or diamonds.

Which "understanding," Nem? The triangulation part is precisely the same thing surveyors use on land, and was known to the ancient Greeks. The size and shape of the Earth's orbit has been very well known since 1800 or before, and is known to a gnat's whisker here in the Space Age.

Hello, MikeB, and welcome to EvC!!There's a more recent article with quite a few literature references here:
RATE's Radiocarbon - Intrinsic or Contamination?I'm sure RAZD will be along shortly, too.I very much doubt that you would see similar effects with the other common radiodating methods for a couple of reasons. First, the other isotopes used have half-lives on the order of the age of the Earth, so you wouldn't see the parent isotope ever getting to such low levels that contamination would bias results. Second, most other methods measure daughters, not parents. And thirdly, I'm not aware of any means to "replenish" isotopes like potassium-40 or rhenium-187 in the ground - only in supernovae.Edited by Coragyps, : add paragraph