by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy Richard Dawkins was recently issued a challenge --disprove creationism in one sentence. I can do that myself. Here it is: if we can see Andromeda --some 2.5 MILLION light years distant from earth --then creationism is false!
Andromeda can be seen even with the naked eye; in any case, it takes light from Andromeda some 2.5 MILLION light years to get here and be seen. That we can see these objects with or without telescopes utterly disproves creationism and a 'young Earth' or young universe.
I chose Andromeda because it is accessible, close enough to be seen with a good pair of binoculars, perhaps, even, with the naked eye. I saw Andromeda as a kid with a pair of hand-me-down 7x35 binoculars duct-tape to a shaky tripod. Deep space images from the Hubble are, of course, state of the art and much more dramatic. Galaxies some 17 BILLION light years distant prove that the Universe is considerably older than Sarah Palin's idiotic concept that homo sapien co-existed with dinosaurs a mere 6000 years ago.
Astronomy mag has an excellent article about how distances are determined. And the speed of light is a universal constant. [See: The Michelson-Morley Experiment. Michael Fowler, Univ. Va. Physics 9/15/08. ] These are not 'assumptions'. This is established, empirical science.
That issue is settled --the speed of light is not an assumption but a proven empirical fact! And so too are the distances to nebulae and galaxies much farther distant than Andromeda.
There are likely to be galaxies that formed slightly earlier, which so far we haven't been able to detect because they are so faint and distant.Below is the Hubble Deep Space photo. Every galaxy in the photo disproves Sarah Palin's 6000 year old universe.
However if we look back too far in time, there's simply no stars and galaxies to look at — after the Big Bang, it would have taken a few hundred million years for matter to clump together with sufficient density for stars and galaxies to form.
So if more powerful telescopes can't enable us to see any further into the universe why are we still building them?
Lomb says larger telescopes will be more sensitive and enable us to look into the past of the universe more clearly.
"There's still the great mysteries of what happened between 13.7 and 13 billion years ago," he says.--What is the most distant galaxy a telescope can detect?
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