IMPACT No. 82
THE SUN IS SHRINKING
by Dr. Russell Akridge*
Institute for Creation Research, PO Box 2667, El Cajon, CA 92021
Voice: (619) 448-0900 FAX: (619) 448-3469
URL = www.ICR.org
"Vital Articles on Science/Creation" April 1980
Copyright © 1980 All Rights Reserved
OBSERVATIONS
Does the size of the sun change over the years? Recently, "John A. Eddy
(Harvard -Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory
in Boulder) and Aram A. Boornazian (a mathematician
with S. Ross and Co. in Boston) have found evidence that the sun has
been contracting about 0.1% per century…corresponding to a shrinkage
rate of about 5 feet per hour."1 The diameter of the sun
is close to one million miles, so that this shrinkage of the sun goes unnoticed
over hundreds or even thousands of years. There is no cause for alarm for
us or for any of our descendants for centuries to come because the sun
shrinks so slowly. Yet the sun does actually appear to shrink. The data
Eddy and Boornazian examined spanned a 400-year period of solar observation,
so that this shrinkage of the sun, though small, is apparently continual.
INTERPRETATION
What does the shrinkage of the sun have to do with creation and evolution?
The sun was larger in the past than it is now by 0.1% per century. A creationist,
who may believe that the world was created approximately 6 thousand years
ago, has very little to worry about. The sun would have been only 6% larger
at creation than it is now. However, if the rate of change of the solar
radius remained constant, 100 thousand years ago the sun would be twice
the size it is now. One could hardly imagine that any life could exist
under such altered conditions. Yet 100 thousand years is a minute amount
of time when dealing with evolutionary time scales.2
How far back in the past must one go to have a sun so large that its
surface touches the surface of the earth? The solar radius changes at 2.5
feet per hour, half the 5 feet per hour change of the solar diameter. The
distance from the sun to the earth is 93 million miles, and there are 5,280
feet in one mile. Assuming (by uniformitarian-type reasoning) that the
rate of shrinkage has not changed with time, then the surface of the sun
would touch the surface of the earth at a time in the past equal to
| t = |
(93,000,000 miles) (5,280 ft/mile) |
| (2.5 ft/hr)
(24 hr/da) (365 day/yr) |
or approximately 20 million B.C. However, the time scales required for
organic evolution range from 500 million years to 2,000 million years.3It
is amazing that all of this evolutionary development, except the last 20
million years, took place on a planet that was inside the sun. By
20 million B.C., all of evolution had occurred except the final stage,
the evolution of the primate into man.
One must remember that the 20 million year B.C. date is the extreme
limit on the time scale for the earth's existence. The time at which
the earth first emerged from the shrinking sun is 20 million B.C. A more
reasonable limit is the 100 thousand year B.C. limit set by the time at
which the size of the sun should have been double its present size.
A further word of explanation is needed about the assumption that the
rate of shrinkage of the sun is constant over 100 thousand years or over
20 million years. The shrinkage rate centuries ago would be determined
by the balance of solar forces. Since the potential energy of a homogeneous
spherical sun varies inversely with the solar radius, the rate of shrinkage
would have been greater in the past than it is now. The time at which the
sun was twice its present size is less than 100 thousand B.C. The time
at which the surface of the sun would touch the earth is much less than
20 million B.C. Therefore, the assumption of a constant shrinkage rate
is a conservative assumption.
SOLAR ENERGY
The shrinkage of the sun greatly alters what we believe to be the energy
source within the sun. The sun shrinks because of its own self-gravitational
attraction. As it compresses itself, it heats itself. This heat is then
liberated in the form of solar radiation, i.e., sunlight.
Would a 2.5 feet per hour contraction of the solar surface be sufficient
to liberate all of the energy that comes from the sun? A crude estimate
can be made by assuming the interior of the sun is uniform. The known formula4
for the gravitational potential energy of two masses m and M a distance
r apart is U = - GmM/r, where G = 6.6 x 10-11jm /kg2.
The gravitational potential energy of the sun's mass Ms interacting
with its own mass Ms is U= - Gms2/R, where
R is the radius of the sun. The solar power produced as the sun shrinks
at the rate of v = R/t is5 P = U/t = (Gms2/R2)
(R/t) = GMs2v/R2. The mass of the sun
is 2 x 1030kg, the radius of the sun is 7 x 108 m,
and the 2.5 feet/hour rate of shrinkage in the radius of the sun is 2 x
10 -4 m/sec. in metric units. The power formula gives a potential
solar power of 1 x 1029 watts. This potential gravitational
power is hundreds of times more than the 4 x 1026 watts
of power actually produced by the sun. This figure is an overestimate because
the sun is actually far from uniform. The massive interior of the sun is
protected by the outer layers of the sun. Only those low density outer
layers are thought to contract. Even so, there is plenty of gravitational
contraction energy potentially available to account for all or a large
part of the sun's energy.
STELLAR EVOLUTION SHAKEN
One thing is certain. Some of the sun's energy comes from its gravitational
self-collapse. Therefore, not all of this energy comes from thermonuclear
fusion. This discovery greatly alters all calculations on the evolution
of the sun, because all of those calculations attribute practically 100%
of the sun's energy over the past 5 billion years to thermonuclear fusion.
The discovery that the sun is shrinking may prove to be the downfall of
the accepted theory of solar evolution. All accepted theories of the evolution
of the stars are based on the assumption that thermonuclear fusion is the
energy source for the stars. If this assumption is unjustified for our
own star, the sun, it is unjustified for the other stars too. The entire
theoretical description of the evolution of the universe may be at stake.
With the stakes that high, it is no wonder that the experimental evidence
for the shrinkage of the sun is "explained away" by evolutionists. Evolutionists
claim that the sun probably undergoes temporary shrinkages and expansions
as small fluctuating oscillations on its overall regular evolutionary development.6
They point to other cyclic solar occurrences such as the 11-year sunspot
cycle on the surface of the sun. This claim is made in spite of the evidence
that the shrinkage rate of the sun has remained essentially constant over
the past 100 years when very accurate measurements have been made on the
size of the sun. Less accurate astronomical records spanning the past 400
years indicate the shrinkage rate has remained the same for the past 400
years.
HISTORICALLY SPEAKING
Scientists have not always attributed the energy source of the sun to thermonuclear
fusion. Prior to the discovery of thermonuclear fusion, Helmholtz predicted
that the energy of the sun was supplied by the gravitational collapse of
the sun.7 This model was accepted until the theory of evolution
began to dominate the scientific scene. Then Helmholtz's explanation was
discarded because it did not provide the vast time span demanded by the
theory of organic evolution on the earth. The substitute theory was introduced
by Bethe in the 1930's precisely because thermonuclear fusion was the only
known energy source that would last over the vast times required by evolution.
Science may now be on the verge of disproving the substitute evolutionary
model of the sun.
CONCLUSION
The change in the size of the sun over the past 400 years is important
in the study of origins. Over 100 thousand years these changes would have
accumulated so much that life of any kind on the earth would have been
very difficult, if not impossible. Thus, all life on the earth must be
less than 100 thousand years old. The sun, 20 million years ago, would
have been so large that it would have engulfed the earth. The earth cannot
be more than 20 million years old. Those dates as upper limits rule out
any possibility of evolution requiring hundreds of millions of years. However,
the tiny change that would have occurred in the sun during the Biblical
time since creation would be so small as to go almost unnoticed. Thus,
the changes in the sun are consistent with recent creation.
The changes detected in the sun call into question the accepted thermonuclear
fusion energy source for the sun. This, in turn, questions the entire theoretical
structure upon which the evolutionary theory of astrophysics is built.
REFERENCES
1 Lubkin, Gloria B., Physics Today,
V.
32, No. 17, 1979.
2 Ordway, Richard J., Earth Science and
the Environment, New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1974, p. 130. Fig. 5 -
23 on this page gives a good illustration of the accepted evolutionary
time scale.
3 Scientific American, V. 239, No.
3, 1978. All articles in this edition list the various evolutionary time
scales.
4 Halliday, David and Resnick, Robert, Fundamentals
of Physics, New York; Wiley, 1974, Chapter 14.
5 The exact formula must be derived layer
by layer using integral calculus. The result is identical to the formula
listed, except that it contains an additional factor. The additional factor
is so close to unity that it makes little difference in an estimation.
6 Lubkin, pg. 18.
7 Poppy, Willard J. and Wilson, Leland L.,
Exploring
the Physical Sciences, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1973, P. 324.
* The Author, Dr. Akridge earned his B.S., M.S.,
and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Georgia Tech. He earned the Th.M. degree
from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Akridge is an Assistant
Professor of Physics at Oral Roberts University. He has written several
articles in the Creation Research Society Quarterly in which he
shows that the laws of physics support a recent creation. [Dr. Akridge
and his wife, Anita, have two children, Floyd and Sheryl. They live in
Tulsa, Oklahoma.]
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