So lately I have been coming upon articles written by experienced creation scientists. I recently read that one of the miracles of our existence is how far our planet is from the sun. Apparently they think that the chance of an orbit being life supportive to be quite high. Is this true? No.
Let us first outline a neat little scientific finding called The Habitable Zone . What exactly is a habitable zone or HZ? Roughly speaking the HZ was originally conceived as a zone, or area in space, that would allow planets to support life. A more detailed explanation is that the HZ is the area in space that is far enough from the Sun so that water will not be boil off the surface and organic compounds will not be destroyed – however close enough to provide energy for all the reactions to create and maintain life.
Originally the HZ extended from the orbit of Mars to the orbit of Venus. This is a substantial distance even when the elliptical orbits are at their closest. However their has been much dispute over the limitations of this zone. The new zone may expand to Jupiter and even to Jupiter’s Moons ( especially Europa ) .
Another fun little propaganda filled statistic is that the chance of a celestial body staying in orbit with our sun is phenomenal. Now to understand the basis of this presumption you may want to know a little bit about how a solar system is actually formed. It starts out with this colossal cloud of gas and dust. This gas and dust is usually the result of a supernova explosion. Thanks to gravitational attraction this huge cloud of dust and gas begins to rotate around a central point. Think of cookie dough being mixed with an egg beater. The cookie dough spins around that central point. During this mixing random masses of cookie dough ( or gas and dust) are scattered to random regions. Some regions have more dough than others. These areas with more mass achieve a sort of snowball effect, collecting more and more material. The areas with less mass eventually succumb to the larger areas. These larger areas are the early forms of Earth and Venus and all the other planets.
All these would-be planets eventually fall in line , or orbit, with the larger central point. This central point eventually gains enough mass which makes tons and tons of pressure. All this pressure gives way extremely high temperatures. This in turn provides an ideal environment for hydrogen fusion which means the formation of our Sun. Any material left after the formation of our solar system that isn’t traveling at just the right speed is either catapulted into deep space because it is traveling too fast, or collides with our Sun because it is traveling too slow.
Now what exactly is the chance of a celestial body achieving this ideal speed? Instead of what some think as a very small and rare chance, it is actually quite large. The different variations of orbital speed, distance, and mass are actually unlimited. We see millions of variations when we look out into space. You can look at some of Kepler’s equations to see this in math. Also no minimum mass exits for a star to be able to hold onto a satellite. Little Pluto has some satellites orbiting around it.
So in conclusion is it so amazing that our planet is where it is? No it isn’t. The HZ shows us that our proximity to the Sun isn’t that miraculous. Kepler and a little information on gravity showed us that the Sun and other stars are not too picky when it comes to orbiting bodies. I hope this straightened some information out for some.
