Protostellar disks
According to the Bible, God created the sun, the moon and the stars on the fourth day and placed them in the firmament of the heaven (Genesis 1:14-19). The biblical account gives the impression that the stars are artificial objects that are just beyond the reach of man.
“The heavens declares the handiwork of the Lord, day onto day utters speech, night unto night reveals knowledge, there is no place where their voice is not heard”. Psalms 19: 1-3.
The phrase "handiwork" suggests that the solar system is artificial – the result of God’s conscious and direct activity. If God created the solar system as his ”handiwork”, one must ask why there are masses of loose space rocks orbiting in and through it? Science gives a realistic answer: the solar system condensed spontaneously from clouds of interstellar matter through naturalistic processes.
A protostellar disk is a flat, rotating disk of gas and dust that surrounds a young, forming star. Protostellar disks form as a natural result of the collapse of a molecular cloud core, i.e. a dense region within a larger molecular cloud of gas and dust. The collapse is triggered by various mechanisms, e.g. by shock waves from nearby supernovae or by the gravitational influence of neighboring clouds.
When a molecular cloud core becomes unstable due to gravity and begins to collapse under its own gravity, it forms a protostar at its center. The cloud around a protostar rotates faster and faster, flattening the rapidly spinning core of the cloud into a spinning disk. Gas from the shell, which initially only had a low angular momentum, can sink directly into the center of the cloud. In this way, the protostar, surrounded by a disk of matter, continues to grow.
Within the disk, dust particles can collide and adhere to each other, gradually forming larger and larger particles. Once these clumps formed, they grew rapidly by sticking to other clumps. As the clumps grew in size, their surface area increased and consequently the speed at which they picked up new material accelerated. Since larger bodies exert a stronger gravitational force, the protostellar dust and gas clump together to form larger bodies called planetesimals. Eventually, almost all the material of the planetesimals was swept up into a few large protoplanets. These accumulations of matter eventually developed into the planets we know today.
Newborn stars also generate strong stellar winds that can push away the light-weight gas and dust of the protostellar disk. In the colder temperatures of the outer solar system, they condense into gas giant planets.
According to Astroomy – A Beginners guide
”After about 100 million years, the primitive solar system had evolved into eight protoplanets, dozens of protomoons, and a glowing protosun at the center. Roughly a billion more years were required to sweep the system clear of interplanetary trash. This was a period of intense meteoritic bombardment whose effects on the Moon and elsewhere are still evident today. Astronomy - A Beginner’s Guide To The Universe, pages 123-4.
Of course the solar system was not completely cleared of this ”interplanetary trash”. The asteroids and comets in our solar system are remnants of the protostellar disk from which the sun and planets formed. Asteroids are rocky remnants that formed closer to the Sun, in the region of the protostellar disk where temperatures were high enough to condense rocky and metallic material. They are mainly found in the asteroid belt, a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Comets, on the other hand, formed further away from the sun, in regions of the protostellar disk where temperatures were lower. These icy bodies consist of a mixture of water ice, frozen gasses, dust and rocky material. Comets generally originate from two main regions: the Kuiper Belt, which lies beyond the orbit of Neptune, and the Oort Cloud, a hypothetical region much further away from the Sun.
There are thousands of near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets that pass close to Earth’s objects. NASA and other space agencies are monitoring and cataloging these objects and preparing for their possible impact on Earth. Recently, astronomers have also observed asteroids and comets coming from other parts of the galaxy:
”Recent surveys have allowed for the detection of the first four known interstellar objects over the past decade: the interstellar meteors CNEOS 2014-01-08, and CNEOS 2017-03-09, the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua and the interstellar comet Borisov”. (Ezell&Loeb, 2022)
Other stars in the universe have formed in similar processes. In our galaxy alone, there are hundreds of billions of stars. Moreover, the processes of star formation in the universe are not yet complete. Astronomers can observe protostellar disks in space. 178 protostellar disks were discovered in one study in the Orion Nebula alone (Ricci et al 2008). Anderson et al. surveyed 320 protoplanetary disks in the star-forming region of Serpens with ALMA (an array of space telescopes).
Astronomers can calculate how long it takes for protostellar disks to condense. The formation time can vary depending on the initial conditions of the molecular cloud, the presence of magnetic fields, turbulence, etc. According to Wilhelm et al., the star can form in a few million years, but the entire process can also take 100 million years; the process can be simulated with a supercomputer.
”Stars form in clusters through the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud. Gaseous circumstellar disks (often also referred to as protoplanetary disks) are left overfrom this process, which are dispersed on a time scale of about 10 Myr. Planets form in these disks on a shorter time scale. The star formation process lasts a few megayears but it takes some 100 Myr for the cluster to dissolve in the Galactic tidal field. The simulations in this work have been carried out on the Cartesius supercomputer, hosted by the Dutch national high performance computing center SURFsara.” Wilhelm et al 2023
Earlier in the history of the universe, the rate of star formation was much higher than today because there used to be more gas clouds. Nevertheless, new stars are still being born, from which completely new solar systems are formed. Astronomers have observed ”starburst galaxies” in which star formation occurs very quickly. According to one estimate, about 4800 new stars are born in the universe every second (!).
Summa Summarum:
1) The solar system is not artificial. The asteroids and comets in our solar system prove that no God made it as ”handiwork”. It condensed naturally from a protostellar disk, by gravity, accretion, centrifugal forces, solar wind, radiation pressure, etc. However, this says nothing about the cause of the Big Bang and thus about the question of whether the universe has design. Perhaps God designed a universe in which star systems form spontaneously through natural forces?
2) The formation processes took a very long time – millions of years for the formation of stars, hundreds of millions for the formation of planets. Also, there was a late heavy bombardment of the Earth that ended about 3.8 billion years ago. So one could argue that the entire formation process took almost a billion years.
3) Similar processes are still going on in the universe: stars and planets are constantly forming in protostellar disks. These disks can be studied with space telescopes. While older stars die, go supernova and turn into neutron stars and black holes, new stars are born. The universe is not dead or stale, but renews itself – like an organism.
The solar system is still populated by remnants of the protostellar disk. In 2013, an asteroid slammed into the atmosphere over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, causing numerous injuries and widespread damage.
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