- Series:Astronomy, Transcript English
Psalm 147:4
“He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.”
Our solar system has a nice, neat structure. The planets all have nice, stable, relatively round orbits. This structure protects the Earth from being struck by another large planet. Evolutionary theories about the origin of the solar system have always said that it formed into its current neat structure from a swirling disk of hot gases that once orbited the sun.
Now, with the discovery of planets orbiting other stars, astronomers are rethinking their theories about how the solar system formed. The problem is that none of the other planetary systems have an orderly structure, and all the planets so far discovered are closer to their stars than we are to the sun. The coolest among them has a surface temperature of 180° F. Most of these planets have orbits so erratic that collisions with other planets are always a threat. So, astronomers wonder, how did our solar system become so well ordered for life? They argue that the large icy planets, Uranus and Neptune, are too large to have formed at the edge of the solar system. So it is concluded that they must have formed closer to the sun, meaning that the solar system was once as chaotic as the recently discovered planetary systems.
However, this new evolutionary approach simply introduces another problem: How could our present orderly solar system have developed out of the chaos of a system in which planets are crashing around like billiard balls? The Bible still offers the best answer. The solar system was designed and created for us by a wise and loving God.
Prayer:
I rejoice, dear Father, because the power You bring to me is Your love. Amen.
Notes:
Discover, 3/00, p. 54, “Solar Revisionism.” Illustration: The planets of our solar system (distances not to scale). Courtesy of Kwamikagami. (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
