A young sun - a response

Here are the three pieces of evidence that they cite.1) The sun's oscillations indicate a young star.When you use seismic readings from the 1970s when the field is just starting (first discovered at all in 1973), that's what you get. Check out up to date publications, such as Long Term Solar Oscillations and the Age of the Sun to understand why.2) The observed absence of appreciable neutrino flux from the sunThat's what you get when you read papers from 1976. The missing neutrinos have been found. They were changing from electron neutrinos to muon and tau neutrinos due to quantum mechanical effects (as had been the prediction). It was a great breakthrough in science when they were found.Note that under gravitational collapse, there wouldn't be nearly so many neutrinos coming from the sun even as were detected in 1976 (any people more up on their physics care to comment as to whether there would be *any*?).The sun is undergoing fusion; there's no question.3) The observed abundance of lithium and beryllium in the stellar atmosphereNot true at all. Read the article Shallow mixing to learn about how *scientists* model it, and why. Also read The Case of the Missing Berylium. For the former, I assume you're familiar with spectral absorption and emission. Of course, if you want to talk about disingenous, read this line from ICR:

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We know that lithium would be destroyed in around 7,500 years[19] when the central temperature of a young star reaches 3 million degrees.[20]

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Observations show that the sun has already lost all but around one thousandth of its original abundance of lithium.[21] This implies that if the sun had the expected initial abundance of lithium, then its central temperature must, of course, be at least 3 million degrees.

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That's like saying that "If you heat water to 100,000 degrees, it will boil in a nanosecond. So, since the water in this cup is boiled off, it must have been heated to 100,000 degrees".Of course, do you know what's most disingenuous about that?Lithium gets destroyed through fission!!! (at least, Lithium-7) So they're arguing *for* fission (and consequently, fusion). It's funny to see creationists grasp at part of a scientific model, when the entire model is necessary for the parts that they grasped at to work at all.The reality is, the sun is exactly in line with similar size and temperature stars. Stars - and we've observed *many* datapoints - are consistant. The question is what internal convection patterns are affecting material flows in what manner. Implicit in Daves assumption is that the sun is thoroughly mixed - which absolutely no model predicts. Buyancy factors alone prevent this, not to mention the effects of the sun's powerful magnetic field on different kinds of ions.It's also worth adding that the temperature of the core isn't 3 million degrees (K?), it's 15 million (I know, I know, they said "at least" - I just thought I'd clarify). And here's how they calculate it. The radiative envelope outside the core averages about 4 million, but has a complex circulation pattern; beyond that is the photosphere at about 6000K, then the chromosphere (actually hotter, at 7,000 K). Finally, you have the corona, which has some of the most complex circulation, and ranges from under 1 million to over 3 million.Essentially noone in the scientific community has any doubts that the sun, like all stars, burns from fusion. Its contents and energy releases are entirely consistant, and are not consistant with gravitational collapse. There *are* protostars in the universe that we can see gaining energy from gravitational collapse. The sun's properties on all levels - from their radiative spectrum to their size and amount of energy released, are fundamentally different.P.S - Here's a hint: When a place cites only ancient papers as references, especially ones from when a field was in its infancy, you should question their scruples. ------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."(Note: after I wrote this, I realized that TalkOrigins already addressed this one - probably better than I did. Oh well!------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 11-18-2003]

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I don't think, however, that you can conclude that they are doing anything deliberately misleading because they omitted some information from this particular article. It is afterall relatively obscure. It may be a simple oversight.

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I normally don't disagree with you Ned, but are you kidding on this one? The discovery of the missing neutrinos was huge news in the scientific community. If they followed anything at all about science, they'd be well aware of it. If they don't follow anything at all about science, why are they pretending to be promoting "science"?neutrinos missing - Google Search ch21,100 hits. From reviewing over them, about half were from before the discovery, and about half after. The amazing thing is that it didn't just make the scientific journals, but it made the popular press as well - in the first couple pages I see an article from AP, Florida Today, Nature, BBC, the Washington Post, and more.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Pretty close, but there's one other factor about the sun that can have a major effect: magnetism. The sun produces intense magnetic fields, and what we're dealing with in the sun is a superheaded plasma (plasma is strongly affected by magnetic fields). This is what produces phenomina such as sunspots, flares, and coronal mass ejections. It also has a strong effect on circulation as well.Also, one has to factor in the Coriolis effect when modelling the sun, which makes both the circulation modelling and magnetic field modelling harder. There would otherwise be a fair degree of global symmetry in the sun if it wasn't for the Coriolis-induced rotational dynamics. I'm sure you can see why it took until the 1980s and 1990s to finally get good models of the sun (modern computing power really helped!)But yes, in general the example that you presented was correct. The (proportionally) small core creates a much larger convection zone above it, much like you find in any heated pot of water or room with a temperature gradient, which creates circulation patterns. However, one big difference is that, in the overall picture, the sun isn't "touching" anything - so you get the thin outer layers superheated (because they cannot get rid of their energy as effectively through convection), causing them to radiate.Big and old stars become even more complicated, by the way, where you have several different regions conducting different kinds of fusion at different depths. ------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

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What was the "cutoff factor" if there is one that divided where the boundries of the Sun stopped in the original matter procurment and the inner planets formed? Also, why are there several inner planets instead of 1 giant planet or at least why is there only 1 planet in each orbital plane and not like in the case of Mercury or Jupiter, 2 or more?

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Good questions! And, unfortunately, it is an incredibly complex process. For example, you'll find that some extrasolar planets that we've discovered have planets bigger than Jupiter orbitting right next to their stars!You have a number of forces going on here. You of course have the gravity of the newly developing star in the center keeping everything in orbit. You have the early solar wind blowing outwards, giving you sort of a reverse centrifuge (lighter and easlier-ionized materials are pushed outwards more). You have the issue of what temperatures things can condense at (solids condense more easily). While at all distances, the cores of the planets tend to be solids or ice (with more of the heavier materials inward), the midrange-distance planets will have an orbit that sweeps through a larger volume of gas (the inner gas being taken or blown off by the star itself, and the outer areas being less dense), accumulating more. Furthest out, you get the ice giants, which aren't able to accumulate as much gas around their icy cores before the inner gas giants hog it all (because the ice giants develop more slowly due to the reduced density of the disk at the point that they orbit in). Furthest out you get your kupier belt objects, which can hardly accumulate anything around them, and remain small.However, the process isn't nearly so simple. Large bodies like Jupiter disrupt matter accretion in bodies like the asteroid belt every time they pass. If an asteroid is far enough out, Jupiter can end up flinging it into a highly elliptical orbit (changing Jupiter's orbit slightly as well); this gets us things like centaurs.It is this capability to "fling" other bodies that leads to one possibility for why "hot Jupiters" occur: that they flung enough matter outwards as to draw themselves inward. The closer they get, the more radiation pressure they will receive from their star (which is magnified by the fact that hot planets "inflate"), pushing it outward, so it can orbit at a balance point. It is likely this radiation pressure which prevents it from suffering from Roche's limit as moons of planets do.Most of this is very difficult to model, however (to get a good model you need a huge number of calculations), so there's a lot of different proposals out there.I can't wait until we learn more about other solar systems. For example, will we find planets with harmonic orbits, or even multiple planets at Lagrange points in orbits around the star (like we see with some moons like Dione and Helene)? Will ice giants get flung inwards and create huge water worlds? Will we find "supercomets", where planet-sized objects have gotten flung into comet-like orbits? It's really interesting to think about.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 12-01-2003]

Why is Buz arguing agains the sun being old, anyway? Isn't he an OEC?------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."