Jupiter’s New Moons
Isaiah 45:12
“I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded”
Of course, the twelve new moons of Jupiter recently discovered are not really new. They were there before, but we hadn’t seen them before. They were probably there when Galileo discovered the first four moons of Jupiter.
A team of astronomers around the world were actually trying to find the elusive Ninth Planet that many believed to exist beyond the orbits of the Trans Neptunian objects, like Pluto and Eris. However, Jupiter was more or less in the path of their observations, and astronomers, using a telescope based in Chile, discovered the moons. But one of these new moons has been described as an oddball.
Most moons of Jupiter orbit in a prograde direction. That is, they orbit in the same direction as the planet’s axial rotation – counter-clockwise, as seen from north of the solar system’s plane. But some moons orbit retrograde, which is a concept very difficult for evolutionary astrophysicists to explain if all the moons coalesced from early planetary material. The oddball moon orbits prograde, but its orbit crosses the orbits of several retrograde moons. As one researcher commented: “This is an unstable situation. Head-on collisions would quickly break apart and grind the objects down to dust.”
If the Solar System had really been in existence for 4.5 billion years, then a collision, involving the oddball moon, would have been pretty much certain to happen. The fact that it has not done so is much more consistent with the biblical timescale of just over 6,000 years.
Prayer: Lord, we know it is so true that the Heavens declare Your glory. So many observations we make in Your universe can only be explained because of the truth of the Bible. Amen.
Ref: ‘Oddball’ among 12 new moons discovered around Jupiter, < https://www.tipnews.com/article/us-space-jupiter-nasa-astronomy-chile, accessed 7/25/2018. Image: NASA, Public Domain.
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