Planets Vanish!

Gliese 581

Proverbs 14:25
"A true witness delivereth souls: but a deceitful witness speaketh lies."

In light of their expectation to find life on other planets, the news story I'm going to tell you about today must have been sheer torture for the Science News magazine to report.

Here's what they wrote: "Two planets considered among the most promising for life outside the solar system don't exist.... The signals embedded in starlight that were attributed to the planets may instead have been caused by the changing magnetic activity of their star, Gliese 581."

Scientists say that the error reinforces the need for "meticulous analyses to separate planets' signals from those generated by spots and flares on stars." Stéphane Udry, an astronomer at the University of Geneva, agrees: "This is a big warning concerning the interpretation of [small] signals as being planets."

In light of these "vanishing" planets, one has to wonder how many other planets are, in fact, non-existent. Could many or most of the millions of planets that are now thought to be hospitable to life be nothing but spots and flares on stars?

Scientists pride themselves on correcting their errors, and this is a good example of that. But when we think of all of the so-called evidences for evolution still in school textbooks, it is abundantly clear that scientists still have much to learn about the errors they stubbornly refuse to correct. Creationists can rejoice that, unlike science textbooks, there is one book that never needs to be corrected or updated – the Bible!

Notes: "Exoplanets once trumpeted as life-friendly may not exist", Science News, 7-3-14. Magazine issue: August 9, 2014.
Photo: Digital Sky Survey / ESO. Courtesy of Lars Lindberg Christensen. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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