Planetary rings, like those encircling Saturn or Jupiter, are a beautiful feature of the heavens. And a brand-new ring system was recently discovered, wrapping around Quaoar, a dwarf planet half the size of Pluto and located past Neptune. This brings the number of ringed objects in our solar system to seven. And—like the rings surrounding Saturn—this planet’s rings are also a challenge to what’s referred to by evolutionists as “ring formation theories.”
The rings of Quaoar don’t follow the “rules” of the evolutionary paradigm!
According to evolutionists, planetary rings formed when “collisions of moonlets orbiting the parent planet created debris that settled into a ring made of rock, ice and dust particles.” But it’s thought that tidal forces created by the planet determine how far away from the planet rings can form. But the rings of Quaoar don’t follow the “rules” of the evolutionary paradigm!
A co-author on a paper describing these new rings states,
The six [previously known] planets with ring systems all have rings which are quite close to the surface of the planet. So this really challenges our ring formation theories…It was previously thought to be impossible to have rings that far out, so in a nutshell, the ring of Quaoar is a real challenge to explain theoretically.
These rings are located “twice as far out as the theoretical maximum limit for a ring system” (that limit is known as the Roche limit) which is a problem for the evolutionary model,
Rings that are formed outside Roche limits aren't meant to be stable; they should rapidly accrete into moonlets, using up all the ring material. . . . With this discovery, we have a ring not just outside the Roche limit, but way beyond it.
Now the scientists are looking into possibilities for why Quaoar’s rings are the way they are—but I actually already have the big-picture answer! And it’s a two-fold answer:
Evolutionary ideas for how everything formed—from planets to stars to all of life—will need constant revision and updating because evolutionists have the wrong starting point of man’s ideas rather than the perfect, infallible Word of God that gives us the true history we need to understand the world around us. And that’s why evolutionists have to keep changing their ideas as more evidence (contradictory evidence) keeps coming.
This item was discussed Wednesday on Answers News with cohosts Rob Webb, Patricia Engler, and Jessica Jaworski. Answers News is our weekly news program filmed live before a studio audience here at the Creation Museum and broadcast on my Facebook page and the Answers in Genesis Facebook page. We also covered the following topics:
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Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken
This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.
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