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What about rings around Uranus?..................

for perusal later...

ping

This article is one big non sequiter.

My oldest daughter is a Cosmic Youth. She has blue hair.

And one of my sons if definitely an alien.

science should tether itself to the observations rather than run amok like a stray dog.

It does.

We think science should tether itself to the observations rather than run amok like a stray dog.

Perhaps young earth creationists should stick to religion and leave science to the scientists?

Now our observations about the universe have to be attacked, I see. I had no idea Darwin was an astronomer.

So now any theoiry that postulates the universe as older than 6,000 years in age is “Darwinism”, right? How long before geocentriam is “real science”, and anything else is “Darwinism”?

Hell, let’s just save a bunch of grief and go back to a flat earth.

"We think science should tether itself to the observations rather than run amok like a stray dog."

I see limited value to tethered science.

>>Would it be reasonable to observe a sparkler for 5 seconds, and then claim it has been burning for 100 years?<<

Actually with Doppler shifts we can tell the speed of stars.

With triangulation we can tell the distance to stars.

Using the speed of light we can tell how long the light had to travel to get here.

Putting all this together we can show that the light from some distant stars traveled a million years or more to get here.

Does this mean that we won’t wrinkle so quickly?

bfl

1) Lunar burps: The moon is passing gas, reported Science News). This explains the long history of observations of lunar transients, or bright flashes observed from Earth on certain parts of the moon. Arlin Crotts (Columbia U) believes the flashes come from the decay of uranium that escapes through cracks, but mentions the possibility that volcanism is still active.

Flashes observed on the Moon are the result of impacts, as are basically all lunar craters. Lunar material contains practically no uranium, and the volcanic explanation for lunar features was outmoded after Apollo 17.

Physics News Update Number 16 (Story #2)
by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein
January 10, 1991
The far side of the Moon, impossible to see from the Earth, was recently photographed by the Galileo spacecraft on its way toward Jupiter. New information about the mineralogical composition of the far side's crust was recorded and pictures revealed the largest impact basin yet seen on the moon, more than 2000 km in diameter and so deep that is may have penetrated through the crust to the moon's mantle. (Eos, January 1, 1991.)
A Celestial Collision
by Larry Gedney
February 10, 1983
Early in the evening of June 18, 1178, a group of men near Canterbury, England, stood admiring the sliver of a new moon hanging low in the west. In terms they later described to a monk who recorded their sighting, "Suddenly a flaming torch sprang from the moon, spewing fire, hot coals and sparks." In continuing their description of the event, they reported that "The moon writhed like a wounded snake and finally took on a blackish appearance"... [P]lanetary scientist Jack Hartung of the State University of New York... gathered enough clues to suggest that a large asteroid... might have smacked into the moon just over the horizon on the back side. To test his suspicion, Hartung went to the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, and inspected Russian and American photographs of the moon's back side. Sure enough, in just the right place, he found a remarkably fresh crater, 12 miles across and twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. From it radiated white splatter marks for hundreds of miles... Such an impact, reason astrophysicists, would set the moon to ringing like a gong for thousands of years... At Texas' McDonald Observatory, astronomers Odile Calame and J. Derral Mulholland of the University of Texas find that the surface of the moon moves back and forth fully 80 feet! Such an oscillation clearly implies a collision with something large, sometime within the not-too-distant past, probably within the memory of mankind. The problem is that there is no way to peg the date exactly at 1178.
A Flash From the Past:
New Evidence Supports Moon Blast
by Henry Fountain
March 4, 2003
On the Moon, material that is freshly exposed has a slight bluish tinge. Over time, because of the constant bombardment of cosmic rays, other high-energy particles and micrometeorites, the structure of the material changes and iron particles tend to predominate, making the material slightly red.

In the Clementine photos, Dr. Buratti and Mr. Johnson found one small crater that was "very, very blue and fresh appearing," Dr. Buratti said. It also happened to be in the exact center of the area they were looking. And it was the proper size â€” slightly less than a mile across, including the ejecta blanket. Dr. Buratti estimated the size of the asteroid at 20 yards in diameter.
Meteors Cause Visible Lunar Explosions
by Stefano Coledan
Popular Mechanics, 2002
Leonid meteor showers are produced when particles from the tail of the comet Tempel-Tuttle encounter the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of more than 60,000 mph... Unlike Earth, however, the moon doesn't have a protective atmosphere... when kilogram-size Leonids hit the lunar surface, they explode in spectacular fashion, digging craters and melting the terrain with temperatures reaching up to 200,000° F... only since 1999 that explosions on the moon have been seen from Earth, Cooke says. In fact, at least six Leonids hit the moon in 1999, causing explosions visible from Earth.
Magnetic Moondust
by Trudy E. Bell & Dr. Tony Phillip
April 5, 2006
"Moondust is strange stuff," explains Taylor. "Each little grain of moondust is coated with a layer of glass only a few hundred nanometers thick (1/100th the diameter of a human hair)." Taylor and colleagues have examined the coating through a microscope and found "millions of tiny specks of iron suspended in the glass like stars in the sky." Those iron specks are the source of the magnetism.

Researchers believe the glass is a by-product of bombardment. Tiny micrometeorites hit the surface of the moon, generating temperatures hotter than 2,000°C, literally the surface temperature of red stars. Such extreme heat vaporizes molecules in the melted soil. "The vapors consist of compounds such as FeO and SiO2," says Taylor. If the temperature is high enough, the molecules split into their atomic components: Si, Fe, O and so on. Later, when the vapors cool, the atoms recombine and condense on grains of moondust, depositing a layer of silicon dioxide (SiO2) glass peppered with tiny nuggets of pure iron (Fe).