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

This doesn't sound right to me if you're thinking there's a relationship between the age of our universe and its size, observable or not.--Percy

What I meant to say is that the Universe is defined by the area that we can observe. The age of the Universe we can see is 13.5 billion years.From my reading, some physicists have proposed that there are other universes out there in the same space we are in. That is, the expansion of our universe is local. These other universes are just very distant, to far away for the light to have reached us. Therefore, the Universe is not defined as all matter/energy that exists but rather the area that we can observe. That is all I was getting at.

I have always pointed to supernova 1987a as evidence for the constant speed of light. However, in recent reading I have discovered that this isn't entirely correct. What we can show with sn1987a is that the light from this supernova had to take 168,000 years to reach the Earth. How so? You simply use the number of days between flash of the supernova and the illumination of the ring around the supernova to construct one side of the triangle (0.658 years). You then use the angle between the supernova and the ring (0.000224 degrees). That's it. From those two values you can calculate the other leg in the right triangle (the leg between the Earth and the supernova) which is also in days. That calcuation returns 168,000 years. You don't input the speed of light anywhere into the calculation. If you want to calculate the DISTANCE to SN1987a then you have to put in speed for light. However, any speed of light you put in returns the same value for the number of years it would take for that light to reach you. Just a little different twist on an old piece of evidence.

Not quite. The Observable Universe is almost indisputedly part of a much larger space-time, even without inflation. With inflation, it's an unbelievably small fraction of the whole Universe. And there's a good chance the Universe is infinite in extent, in which case what we can see is essentially 0% of what there is!Also virtually indisuptable is that 13.5bn years ago, the Observable Universe was contained within the volume of an atom. Even if the Universe does extend further back past where we usually place the singularity, the Universe has still passed through this "squeeze point". To be clear, there is no one event horizon in de Sitter Space - every observer has his own horizon. This is unlike the single horizon of a black hole. No, this is a common misconception - understandable, but you need to appreciate the added complexity of our observations being constrained by the speed of light. As we observe further, we are observing the Universe at earlier and earlier times, when it was smaller and smaller. The expansion is also not a velocity and hence not constrained by the speed of light. You may want to ask "how big is the Observable Universe *now*, even though we cannot see it as it is *now*?" The answer is about 46 billion light years in radius.

Hey Taq,If you put [blockcolor=white] and [/blockcolor] around your gif you get: which you then need to center if you want it there. Yep, and one of the interesting things is what the light shows: radioactive decay that has the same brief half-life for come of the Cobalt isotopes that we see today.So the decay rate has not changed in 168,000 years.Enjoy.

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This bit of logic always make my brain twitch.

Ah, quite right. I should have said "...3000 years ago...". But of course I didn't say that, so thanks for the correction, 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

I think "true" or "not true" are categories that don't apply to the bible. The bible was written by the the jews at a time that the scientific outlook was still very poor. they tried to make sense of a world they didn't understand and that was very hostile. (To mention just one aspect of this hostiel world: compare the risk of dying for a woman during birth in a underdevelopped country with that in an industrial country. And even the underdevelopped countries are better than the primitive conditions in which the jews lived then.)
We can read the bible, to try to appreciate how primitive people see the world, but we can't apply criteria like true or not true to this.Edited by driewerf, : No reason given.

I think that quite a lot of your trouble comes from the fact that you stronly underestimate the lifetime of stars. Even very short living stars live easely a few billions of years. Even with our knowledge now, we can't estimate the age of stars with the accuracy of hundredthousands of years. So your whole argument is baseless.

Stars with a mass of more than twice our sun live less than a billion years. The largest stars live less than 10 million (that's million with an "m") years.Apothecus's example isn't affected by the actual lifetimes of stars. It was an explanation of how distance affects how long it takes light to reach us. The object emitting the light isn't a pertinent detail of the explanation.--Percy

Hey there driewerf and welcome... Aside from the fact that if you read up on it, you'll find you're overestimating the age of stars, you seem to miss the point of my (admittedly silly) allegory. The ages I used were entirely arbitrary and were chosen for understandability-related reasons. Relatively small numbers are easier to digest for some than bigger numbers... Although Huntard found a flaw in my reasoning, the correction I made should make the argument sound. Minus the evil spacefaring species hell bent on stellar destruction, are you suggesting a star couldn't have formed 300000 years prior to its resultant light first becoming visible on earth 150000 years ago?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

Distance between two objects is not a clear indicator of age.You admit that though the stars are far away....whereever they are located....they are alive right NOW.If I can imagine a distant planet with life on it...I can admit they are over there, and I am here....that in no way determines who's older.Being there or being here...does not determine who's older.Thank you, Nuimshaan

In fact that's exactly what it is.If you know that it takes a week for a letter to travel between point A and point B, then you know that the most recent the letter could possibly be is one week old. It can't be any younger than that, because if it is, you haven't gotten it yet.Imagine you're getting these week-old letters from your cousin. You're reading the letter just as your own son is born, and in the letter, you read your cousin announcing the birth of his new daughter.Because of the distance between you and your cousin, you know that your cousin's daughter is at least a week older than your new son. Not because distance means age, but because distance means information is coming from in the past, not immediately.Many of the stars we see are so incomprehensibly far away that the light takes millions or even billions of years to reach us. Far, far more than the 10,000 years creationists say is the maximum age of the universe. How can the universe contain something older than itself? It's an impossibility; thus, the age of the oldest known object is the youngest the universe could possibly be.

Not technically so. For instance, if we see a star that is 4 billion light years away, we see it as it was 4 billion years ago.ABE:I thought this was what you meant when I responded in Message 74. I guess my drunkenness didn't put me too far off base.Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.

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Withdrawn.Edited by Percy, : Crash and Hooah had pretty good responses, removing mine now.