Doesn't the distance of stars disprove the young earth theory?

Hi Percy,Based on those numbers, how big would our sun have been 4.5 billions years ago?IC

About the same size as it is today.Here is a picture: Yes, it says "not to scale", but that's only for the ones in the latter stages (red giant and later), whixh is why I suspect it is only on the right of the picture

Hi Nuimshaan, Looks like I gave you way too much credit in my first reply to you. I was apparently confused by your rambling post and attributed meaning to it where there was none. Silly me.Evidently you're somehow of the notion that any star we see still exists. That's quite funny, as it is very possible many of those stars have in reality have gone nova or plain burned out at any time between their births and the present day. We just may not be close enough to witness these events yet...Have a good one.

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"My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. J.B.S Haldane 1892-1964

Percy's numbers were not refering to the Sun so largely irrelevant. 4.5 billion years ago is a bit vague so could catch the Sun at various stages from enormous coalescing gas cloud to proto-star to early stages of the Sun proper. This covers a huge range of sizes. BUT the mass would have been the same (within a couple of %) at all stages including today, and it is mass that dictates the lifetime, not volume.

Hi ICDesign, I may be way off base on your point here, but you're not really planning to trot out a Hovind-esque "large sun" reverse extrapolation to explain why it's impossible that our solar system is as old as science says it is?Are you?

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"My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. J.B.S Haldane 1892-1964

Hi Huntard,Could you please provide the link where you got this chart?Thanks much,
IC

If you sue peek you can see the image is from wiki. I typed in solar life scycle and it sent me to Stellar evolution that shows the image.Stellar evolution - WikipediaSimple really.

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

Are we limited to seeing only 13.5 billion light years due to a technical limitation? IE the resolution of our cameras.

No, because of the age of the universe. You can't see things if the light hasn't reached you yet, and since the universe is 13.5 billion years old, you can't see more than 13.5 billion light years away. Of course, that what you see at 13.5 billion light years away is at the time you see it much farther away, since it took the light 13.5 billion years to reach us. That's why what you see now as being 13.5 billion light years away is at the time of seeing it actually 46 billion light years away.

At the moment, we cannot see beyond the "surface of last scattering", which is the point when the Universe went from opaque to transparent. Before this time, the Universe was filled with a proton/electron plasma, hence photons had a very short mean free path. As the Universe cooled, the electrons and protons combined (hence "recombination")to form neutral hydrogen, and the photons were now free ("decoupled") to travel unhindered through the Universe - "vision" became possible. The first photons to fly free form the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). This occured 13.5 billion years ago, about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. This will always be the limit to our electromagnetic observations (visible, IR, UV, radio, X-ray, etc).There was a much earlier decoupling when the Universe's density decreased to the point that neutrinos could suddenly travel freely. So there is an analagous Cosmic Neutrino Background Radiation there for the detection which will represent an observation of the Universe at a far earlier stage than the CMBR. But we're probably a few thousand year's of technology away from being able to meaure it!!

Sorry to dredge this up again, not sure where else to ask.If our galaxy takes 250 million years to make one rotation and the universe is 13.5 billion years old does that mean the Milky Way has only made 54 revolutions? Surely not.Edited by Dogmafood, : No reason given.

What does the age of the universe have to do with the age of our galaxy?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Pretty sure we can say that the universe showed up before the galaxy. What am I missing?

Our galaxy itself seems to be rather old, maybe 13.2 billion years old, but the thin disk itself seems to be much younger.This seems to indicate that the age and shape of the galaxy has changed over time and so it's likely that the rate of rotation has also changed over time. For example, some estimates I've seen show that the thin disk, where we are, may only be 7-10 billion years old. If that's true then the area where Earth is located my only have made about 30 trips around.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

No probklem at all. Yep And as Jar pointed out, it's actually less! When you look at the Universe from the point of view of the galaxies, it is a very different place; it is almost on a human scale: it's age is several tens of "years" (rotations of the galaxies), and distances are typically very local - distance from one galaxy to the next is measured in a few diameters of a galaxy! For example, our sister galaxy, Andromeda, which is essentially the same size and type of galaxy as ours, is only a mere 20 diaimeters of the Milky Way away from us! And there are plenty of minor galaxies at smaller distances. If you could turn up the sensitivity of your eyes, you would see that Andromeda is as wide on the sky as four diameters of the moon!!How about this? Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.