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

I may be completely off base in my thinking here, but Nuimshaan may have a point.Imagine that a star became visible to eyes on earth by *insert star formation method here * back in, say, 150,000 BCE, and that that visible star wasn't catalogued until say, 600 CE. In, say, 1975, this star was found by parallax, red shift, etc... to be 300000 light years away. I think he's saying that since we don't know exactly when that light became visible to us here on earth, the age of that star is impossible to know. If we'd have been on earth to make a measurement of 300000 light years away at the moment the star became visible, we'd know that it was born about 300000 years ago...However...That's not to say that star is still around. The star could have been blown apart by evil spacefarers 3000 years after it was formed (work with me here), and thus we'd be viewing it not as it is, which is a bunch of space debris and heat, but as it was, which is a nice, pretty star.But again, I may be talking way out of my arse. Anyone?

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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

Forgive me, I was drunk when I wrote that. Looking back, I have no idea why the hell I said what I said.

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Well, I think there are ways to deduce a stars age, which will probably have to do with the ratio of helium versus hydrogen it contains.I think astronomers have a pretty good idea of the age of most stars, and this has nothing to do with when they were first recorded.Then again, it's completely irrelevant, if we see the star now, and it is 300,000 light years away, then it means the universe still has to be at least 300,000 years old, or else, we wouldn't see the star.

We are not determining the age of the STAR by its distance from the Earth. We are determining the minimum age of the Universe, the spacetime in which we exist. Light travels at 3x10^8 m/s. No faster, no slower. When we are hit by photons from a star that is 3 million light years away that means that those photons left that star 3 million years ago. We can see galaxies of stars that more than 3 million light years away. This falsifies a young earth. But it does give us the age of the universe.

Well, not really, now does it. I mean, the age of the earth is of course independent from the age of the universe. Even if the Earth was only made yesterday, the universe would still be at least 3 billion years old from your example star.

There is no "time" continuum. Passage of time is unique to each individual object that travels. And the speed that an object travels has a direct impact on the time experienced by that object. This is the most basic most obvious (4-dimensional) geometry - time experienced is the length of the 4-dimensional path through space-time - and to argue against it is the very essence of stupidity. Every particle accelerator in the world is built taking into account the very fact of time dilation. Guess what? They work. No, it is not defined as this. And it is very much true. And is demonstrated 100% true every second of every day that particle accelerators are in operation. Time-dilation has nothing to do with seeing the prehistoric Earth - you seem very confused by all of this. Observations of the Moon show the Moon as it was about 1 second ago. The radio delay when the Apollo missions transmitted their communications demonstrates this without question. We see the Sun as it was 8 minutes ago. If it explodes, we won't know until 8 minutes later. With Jupiter, the situation si even more pronounced - and radio signals from our probes can take an hour or more to arrive. When we observe a star at 8000 light years distance, then we are seeing it as it was 8000 years ago. This is the most basic physics, and has nothing to do with time dilation. I'm fairly sure that most of the members of EvC are safe from such accusations. You on the other hand may want to avoid such an environment...

True enough. But I wasn't born yesterday . . .

No doubt. Though convincing some folk of this is likened to herding cats. No arguments here, Huntard.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

for the next 3000 years.That is true in the same way as the sun could have blown up 2 minutes ago but we would still see it as it was for the next 6 minutes.

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008

Can anyone put Hubble's Law into simple terms for me? How does it account for all the time that it took those distant stars to form and start shining?

I don't see what Hubble's law has to do with the formation of stars. It simply states that the distance of a galaxy to our own is proportional to the velocity with which it is receding from us.

So Hubbles law and redshift and parallax show us that the farthest stars (that we can see) are at least 13.5 billion light years away. Is it suspected that the universe is actually much older but we just cant prove it yet?Also, is that 6.75 billion light years in any direction? Is it a radius or a diameter measurement?

Yes, exactly what I was getting at. Thanks.

Well, actually (please bear with me here, I just thought of this ), if the star was first visible 150,000 years ago, and was destroyed 3,000 years after it's "birth", we wouldn't actually be able to see it these days, would we? It would stopped being visible at 147,000 years ago.

This is where we run into a problem of definition. The Universe is defined by what we can observe, and the observable universe is 13.5 billion years old by the travel of light. Could our observable universe be part of a larger spacetime that is much older? Many theoretical physicists believe so, some don't. It's a mixed bag.If you want to do some more reading you should check out the wiki page on De Sitter Universe. In this type of universe there is an event horizon which is defined by the expansion of space where the expansion adds up to the speed of light. Radius. It is 13.5 billion light years in all directions.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.