Podcast appearances and mentions of star clusters

Is there really a music of the spheres? And why is space so inspirational for creativity? To ponder these cosmic questions, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome noted composer and pianist Bruce Lazarus.   As always, though, we start off with the day's joyfully cool cosmic thing, this time in honor of our guest: the fact that the movie “Oppenheimer” won the Academy Award for Best Original Score. Chuck mentions some other incredible musical scores, especially John William's soundtrack to “Star Wars.” Bruce points out that Williams also did the theme song and soundtrack to the 1960s TV series, “Lost In Space.” And of course, his soundtracks for “Jurassic Park,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”   Bruce has composed many musical pieces inspired by and about the cosmos, including “Musical Explorations of Messier Star Clusters and Nebulae” and “Starry Messenger.”   He talks about how the early U.S. space program and the Mercury 7, and the U.S. World's Fair in 1964 inspired him. And while he got away from space-themed music for a while after his time at Juilliard in the 1970s, Bruce estimates that about two thirds of his work over the last 20 years has been astronomy themed. He talks about being inspired by other musical works, from science fiction movie soundtracks like “Arrival” to a few classical pieces like “Colors of the Celestial City” and “Visions from Beyond” by Olivier Messiaen.   For our first student question, Ariella asks, “Is there really a music of the spheres?” To answer, Bruce quotes the 5th Century Roman philosopher Boethius, who wrote about how everything is vibrating, so everything has sound. We then listen to a portion of Bruce Lazarus's piece, “Boethius Said.” Allen talks about how many aspects of our existence involve vibration and sound while Chuck brings up the Cosmic Microwave Background and Gravitational Wave Background.   Bruce talks about his cycle of 14 pieces for the solo piano inspired by the most commonly referenced Hubble images of the celestial objects found in the Messier Catalog (not to be confused with Messiaen), including Andromeda Galaxy (M31), Ring Nebula (M57), Eagle Nebula (M16), Sombrero Galaxy (M104), and the Pleiades (M45).   Our next student question comes from Gino, who asks, “Did you ever want to be a scientist before you became a composer?” Bruce explains that he's always liked building things, so he began building music the way he'd built model airplanes, and at 14 years old decided he wanted to be a composer and also focused on the piano, for both composing and making money! The trio ends up discussing the original “Tron” – and believe it or not, it's Bruce who brings it up, not our Geek-in-Chief Chuck!   Our last student question comes from Wally, who asks, “Why is space the most inspirational thing to you when writing music?” Bruce describes how space has been a large part of his life for as long as he can remember. He talks about the Veil Nebula, and why he didn't include it in his Messier cycle. He also shares his experience watching the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse, and how the reality of seeing it with his own eyes impacted him unexpectedly.   If you'd like to know more about Bruce, you can visit his website at www.brucelazaruscomposer.com.   We hope you enjoy this episode of The LIUniverse, and, if you do, please support us on Patreon.   Credits for Images Used in this Episode: – NASA's first astronauts, the “Mercury 7” – NASA, Public Domain – Olivier Messiaen – Dutch National Archives, Public Domain – Andromeda Galaxy (M31) – Kees Scherer, Public Domain – Ring Nebula (M57) – NASA, ESA, and C. Robert O'Dell, Public Domain – Eagle Nebula (M16) – NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), Public Domain – Sombrero Galaxy (M104) – NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), Public Domain – Pleiades (M45) – NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech, Palomar Observatory, Public Domain – Crab Nebula (M1) – NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll, Public Domain – Veil Nebula –  Giuseppe Donatiello – The April 8 2024 Total Solar Eclipse – NASA Headquarters / NASA/Keegan Barber   Credits for Music Used in this Episode: – “Boethius Said”; Original Lyrics by Boethius, Music & Lyrics by Bruce Lazarus, performed by Cantabile Chamber Chorale, Directed by Rebecca Scott. Used with permission from Bruce Lazarus. – “M1 Crab Nebula” from “Musical Explorations of the Messier Catalogue of Star Clusters and Nebulae.” Composed and performed by Bruce Lazarus. Used with permission from Bruce Lazarus.   #TheLIUniverse #CharlesLiu #AllenLiu #SciencePodcast #AstronomyPodcast  #BruceLazarus #MusicoftheSpheres #CharlesMessier #MessierCatalog #Boethius #BoethiusSaid #MusicalExplorationsoftheMessierCatalogue #StarClusters #Nebulae #ColorsoftheCelestialCity #OlivierMessiaen #CelestialObjects #HubbleSpaceTelescope #SolarEclipse

Venture into the cosmic depths with SpaceTime Series 27 Episode 63, where we unearth some of the universe's most ancient stars hiding in the halo of our very own Milky Way. These celestial elders, dubbed SAS stars, are remnants from a time when galaxies were just beginning to coalesce, offering a unique window into the universe's formative years. With their discovery, we edge closer to unraveling the mysteries of galaxy formation and the evolution of the cosmos.Next, we embark on a journey alongside Europe's JUICE spacecraft, now one year into its monumental eight-year voyage to the icy moons of Jupiter. This mission promises to probe the potential habitable environments beneath the moons' frozen crusts and could redefine our search for extraterrestrial life within our solar system.Finally, we witness Russia flexing its spacefaring muscles with the test launch of the new heavy-lift Angara A-5 rocket, aiming to usher in a new era for Russian space exploration and retire the venerable Proton rockets.Join us on SpaceTime with Stuart Gary for a cosmic exploration that spans from our galactic neighborhood to the far reaches of the Jovian system, and beyond.(00:00) This is spacetime series 27, episode 63. (00:46) Astronomers have discovered three of the oldest stars in the universe(05:25) The Jupiter icy moons explorer, or juice spacecraft, celebrated its first year in space(11:15) The Kremlin have undertaken a successful test launch of their new Angara a five rocket(12:41) Up to 246 million older adults could be exposed to dangerous acute heat by 2050(15:11) There's been another Bigfoot sighting in Manchester, EnglandSupport:Tune into SpaceTime with Stuart Gary, available on your favorite podcast app, and follow our journey through the stars on Twitter @stuartgary, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.This episode is proudly supported by our patrons who help keep the show going. Become a supporter and access ad-free episodes. Details at https://www.bitesz.com/show/spacetime/support/Sponsor:This episode is proudly supported by NordPass. Secure your digital journey across the cosmos with a password manager you can trust. Find your stellar security solution at https://www.bitesz.com/nordpass.www.spacetimewithstuartgary.comwww.bitesz.comhttps://www.patreon.com/spacetimewithstuartgary

Hosted by Chris Beckett & Shane Ludtke, two amateur astronomers in Saskatchewan. actualastronomy@gmail.com Our guest today is Peter Jedicke who was National President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada from 2004 to 2006 and is now a Fellow of the RASC. He is also Honorary President of the RASC London Centre. His favourite astronomical topic, both astrophysically and as an observer, is globular clusters and co-authored the RASCC Observer's Handbook section on Star Clusters. Peter co-authors the Star Clusters section of the RASC Observer's Handbook. Lastly, Peter helped start the list of asteroid names with Canadian connections which will be our topic today but….   Let's  chat about globular star clusters since, as you pointed out Peter, it's best to focus on a narrow topic as the show time whips by!   * Helen B. Sawyer [Hogg], 1947. Out of Old Books-Catalogues of Nebulous Objects in the Eighteenth Century. Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol. 41, p. 265-273 Also: Helen B. Sawyer [Hogg], 1948. Astronomical Journal, Vol. 53, p. 117 * * What are Star Clusters? * - 2 types: OC and GC what is the diff…maybe we'll do Open Clusters another time. * - Age & Number of stars which equate to variations in CLs + magnitude, colour + number. * Where do they come from    * So what is a globular star cluster exactly?    * Why old-rich-symetrical-live in galactic halo?    * What are the differences in concentration and spectral classifications?    * What is it you enjoy about globulars?    * Variable stars in globular clusters    * Helen Sawyer Hogg & my one summer working as a "research assistant" at Western U.    * Something about where globular clusters fit in with cosmology. Age & role in galaxy mergers.    * How many have you observed?    * Where have you traveled to observe them?    * Which are your favourites?   We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs.  Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too!  Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.  Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

February is the month of love, and in this episode of the Kielder Observatory Podcast discover how to see a heart light years away in space! Our Director of Astronomy Dan Pye explains the other celestial events occurring through February including our Pye in the Sky challenge!The main theme of this episode is the Aurora, our science communicator Ishbel Wright has recently ventured north of the Arctic Circle as part of a university project to install a network of cameras to give us a better understanding of this phenomenon. But of course she also saw the northern lights for herself more intensely than ever! As we move towards another peak time to see the Aurora in the UK, we also give you a few tips to improve your chances of bagging a photo for yourself!   Aurora Borealis, Arctic Circle, Night Sky, Planetary Conjunctions, Venus, Heart Nebula, Cassiopeia, Pleiades, Constellations, Andromeda Galaxy, Science Communicator, Ionosphere, Tromso Norway, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Star Clusters, Caroline Rose Cluster, Ishbel Wright, Dan PyeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosted by Chris Beckett & Shane Ludtke, two amateur astronomers in Saskatchewan. actualastronomy@gmail.com * Our guest today is Peter Jedicke * I first met Peter when we served on the RASC National Council * Craige Levine, who is a past guest from last Spring, had moved to London Ont….   Bio: Peter was National President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada from 2004 to 2006 and is now a Fellow of the RASC. He is also Honorary President of the RASC London Centre. His favourite astronomical topic, both astrophysically and as an observer, is globular clusters and co-authored the RASCC Observer's Handbook section on Star Clusters. Lastly,  Peter helped start the list of asteroid names with Canadian connections which will be our topic today but….   We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs.  Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too!  Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.  Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

-- Finches Diversify in Decades, Opals Form in Months,  Man's Genetic Diversity in 200 Generations, C-14 Everywhere: Real Science Radio hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams present their classic program that led to the audience-favorites rsr.org/list-shows! See below and hear on today's radio program our list of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things! From opals forming in months to man's genetic diversity in 200 generations, and with carbon 14 everywhere it's not supposed to be (including in diamonds and dinosaur bones!), scientific observations fill the guys' most traditional list challenging those who claim that the earth is billions of years old. Many of these scientific finds demand a re-evaluation of supposed million and billion-year ages. * Finches Adapt in 17 Years, Not 2.3 Million: Charles Darwin's finches are claimed to have taken 2,300,000 years to diversify from an initial species blown onto the Galapagos Islands. Yet individuals from a single finch species on a U.S. Bird Reservation in the Pacific were introduced to a group of small islands 300 miles away and in at most 17 years, like Darwin's finches, they had diversified their beaks, related muscles, and behavior to fill various ecological niches. Hear about this also at rsr.org/spetner. * Opals Can Form in "A Few Months" And Don't Need 100,000 Years: A leading authority on opals, Allan W. Eckert, observed that, "scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands... Not true." A 2011 peer-reviewed paper in a geology journal from Australia, where almost all the world's opal is found, reported on the: "new timetable for opal formation involving weeks to a few months and not the hundreds of thousands of years envisaged by the conventional weathering model." (And apparently, per a 2019 report from Entomology Today, opals can even form around insects!) More knowledgeable scientists resist the uncritical, group-think insistence on false super-slow formation rates (as also for manganese nodules, gold veins, stone, petroleum, canyons and gullies, and even guts, all below). Regarding opals, Darwinian bias led geologists to long ignore possible quick action, as from microbes, as a possible explanation for these mineraloids. For both in nature and in the lab, opals form rapidly, not even in 10,000 years, but in weeks. See this also from creationists by a geologist, a paleobiochemist, and a nuclear chemist. * Finches Speciate in Two Generations vs Two Million Years for Darwin's Birds?  Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands are said to have diversified into 14 species over a period of two million years. But in 2017 the journal Science reported a newcomer to the Island which within two generations spawned a reproductively isolated new species. In another instance as documented by Lee Spetner, a hundred birds of the same finch species introduced to an island cluster a 1,000 kilometers from Galapagos diversified into species with the typical variations in beak sizes, etc. "If this diversification occurred in less than seventeen years," Dr. Spetner asks, "why did Darwin's Galapagos finches [as claimed by evolutionists] have to take two million years?" * Blue Eyes Originated Not So Long Ago: Not a million years ago, nor a hundred thousand years ago, but based on a peer-reviewed paper in Human Genetics, a press release at Science Daily reports that, "research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today." * Adding the Entire Universe to our List of Not So Old Things? Based on March 2019 findings from Hubble, Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and his co-authors in the Astrophysical Journal estimate that the universe is about a billion years younger than previously thought! Then in September 2019 in the journal Science, the age dropped precipitiously to as low as 11.4 billion years! Of course, these measurements also further squeeze the canonical story of the big bang chronology with its many already existing problems including the insufficient time to "evolve" distant mature galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, enormous black holes, filaments, bubbles, walls, and other superstructures. So, even though the latest estimates are still absurdly too old (Google: big bang predictions, and click on the #1 ranked article, or just go on over there to rsr.org/bb), regardless, we thought we'd plop the whole universe down on our List of Not So Old Things!   * After the Soft Tissue Discoveries, NOW Dino DNA: When a North Carolina State University paleontologist took the Tyrannosaurus Rex photos to the right of original biological material, that led to the 2016 discovery of dinosaur DNA, So far researchers have also recovered dinosaur blood vessels, collagen, osteocytes, hemoglobin, red blood cells, and various proteins. As of May 2018, twenty-six scientific journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, PLoS One, Bone, and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, have confirmed the discovery of biomaterial fossils from many dinosaurs! Organisms including T. Rex, hadrosaur, titanosaur, triceratops, Lufengosaur, mosasaur, and Archaeopteryx, and many others dated, allegedly, even hundreds of millions of years old, have yielded their endogenous, still-soft biological material. See the web's most complete listing of 100+ journal papers (screenshot, left) announcing these discoveries at bflist.rsr.org and see it in layman's terms at rsr.org/soft. * Rapid Stalactites, Stalagmites, Etc.: A construction worker in 1954 left a lemonade bottle in one of Australia's famous Jenolan Caves. By 2011 it had been naturally transformed into a stalagmite (below, right). Increasing scientific knowledge is arguing for rapid cave formation (see below, Nat'l Park Service shrinks Carlsbad Caverns formation estimates from 260M years, to 10M, to 2M, to it "depends"). Likewise, examples are growing of rapid formations with typical chemical make-up (see bottle, left) of classic stalactites and stalagmites including:- in Nat'l Geo the Carlsbad Caverns stalagmite that rapidly covered a bat - the tunnel stalagmites at Tennessee's Raccoon Mountain - hundreds of stalactites beneath the Lincoln Memorial - those near Gladfelter Hall at Philadelphia's Temple University (send photos to Bob@rsr.org) - hundreds of stalactites at Australia's zinc mine at Mt. Isa.   - and those beneath Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance. * Most Human Mutations Arose in 200 Generations: From Adam until Real Science Radio, in only 200 generations! The journal Nature reports The Recent Origin of Most Human Protein-coding Variants. As summarized by geneticist co-author Joshua Akey, "Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so" (the same number previously published by biblical creationists). Another 2012 paper, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Eugenie Scott's own field) on High mitochondrial mutation rates, shows that one mitochondrial DNA mutation occurs every other generation, which, as creationists point out, indicates that mtEve would have lived about 200 generations ago. That's not so old! * National Geographic's Not-So-Old Hard-Rock Canyon at Mount St. Helens: As our List of Not So Old Things (this web page) reveals, by a kneejerk reaction evolutionary scientists assign ages of tens or hundreds of thousands of years (or at least just long enough to contradict Moses' chronology in Genesis.) However, with closer study, routinely, more and more old ages get revised downward to fit the world's growing scientific knowledge. So the trend is not that more information lengthens ages, but rather, as data replaces guesswork, ages tend to shrink until they are consistent with the young-earth biblical timeframe. Consistent with this observation, the May 2000 issue of National Geographic quotes the U.S. Forest Service's scientist at Mount St. Helens, Peter Frenzen, describing the canyon on the north side of the volcano. "You'd expect a hard-rock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old. But this was cut in less than a decade." And as for the volcano itself, while again, the kneejerk reaction of old-earthers would be to claim that most geologic features are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, the atheistic National Geographic magazine acknowledges from the evidence that Mount St. Helens, the volcanic mount, is only about 4,000 years old! See below and more at rsr.org/mount-st-helens. * Mount St. Helens Dome Ten Years Old not 1.7 Million: Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Mass., using potassium-argon and other radiometric techniques claims the rock sample they dated, from the volcano's dome, solidified somewhere between 340,000 and 2.8 million years ago. However photographic evidence and historical reports document the dome's formation during the 1980s, just ten years prior to the samples being collected. With the age of this rock known, radiometric dating therefore gets the age 99.99999% wrong. * Devils Hole Pupfish Isolated Not for 13,000 Years But for 100: Secular scientists default to knee-jerk, older-than-Bible-age dates. However, a tiny Mojave desert fish is having none of it. Rather than having been genetically isolated from other fish for 13,000 years (which would make this small school of fish older than the Earth itself), according to a paper in the journal Nature, actual measurements of mutation rates indicate that the genetic diversity of these Pupfish could have been generated in about 100 years, give or take a few. * Polystrates like Spines and Rare Schools of Fossilized Jellyfish: Previously, seven sedimentary layers in Wisconsin had been described as taking a million years to form. And because jellyfish have no skeleton, as Charles Darwin pointed out, it is rare to find them among fossils. But now, reported in the journal Geology, a school of jellyfish fossils have been found throughout those same seven layers. So, polystrate fossils that condense the time of strata deposition from eons to hours or months, include: - Jellyfish in central Wisconsin were not deposited and fossilized over a million years but during a single event quick enough to trap a whole school. (This fossil school, therefore, taken as a unit forms a polystrate fossil.) Examples are everywhere that falsify the claims of strata deposition over millions of years. - Countless trilobites buried in astounding three dimensionality around the world are meticulously recovered from limestone, much of which is claimed to have been deposited very slowly. Contrariwise, because these specimens were buried rapidly in quickly laid down sediments, they show no evidence of greater erosion on their upper parts as compared to their lower parts.- The delicacy of radiating spine polystrates, like tadpole and jellyfish fossils, especially clearly demonstrate the rapidity of such strata deposition. - A second school of jellyfish, even though they rarely fossilized, exists in another locale with jellyfish fossils in multiple layers, in Australia's Brockman Iron Formation, constraining there too the rate of strata deposition. By the way, jellyfish are an example of evolution's big squeeze. Like galaxies evolving too quickly, galaxy clusters, and even human feet (which, like Mummy DNA, challenge the Out of Africa paradigm), jellyfish have gotten into the act squeezing evolution's timeline, here by 200 million years when they were found in strata allegedly a half-a-billion years old. Other examples, ironically referred to as Medusoid Problematica, are even found in pre-Cambrian strata. - 171 tadpoles of the same species buried in diatoms. - Leaves buried vertically through single-celled diatoms powerfully refute the claimed super-slow deposition of diatomaceous rock. - Many fossils, including a Mesosaur, have been buried in multiple "varve" layers, which are claimed to be annual depositions, yet they show no erosional patterns that would indicate gradual burial (as they claim, absurdly, over even thousands of years). - A single whale skeleton preserved in California in dozens of layers of diatom deposits thus forming a polystrate fossil. - 40 whales buried in the desert in Chile. "What's really interesting is that this didn't just happen once," said Smithsonian evolutionist Dr. Nick Pyenson. It happened four times." Why's that? Because "the fossil site has at least four layers", to which Real Science Radio's Bob Enyart replies: "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha", with RSR co-host Fred Williams thoughtfully adding, "Ha ha!" * Polystrate Trees: Examples abound around the world of polystrate trees:  - Yellowstone's petrified polystrate forest (with the NPS exhibit sign removed; see below) with successive layers of rootless trees demonstrating the rapid deposition of fifty layers of strata. - A similarly formed polystrate fossil forest in France demonstrating the rapid deposition of a dozen strata. - In a thousand locations including famously the Fossil Cliffs of Joggins, Nova Scotia, polystrate fossils such as trees span many strata. - These trees lack erosion: Not only should such fossils, generally speaking, not even exist, but polystrates including trees typically show no evidence of erosion increasing with height. All of this powerfully disproves the claim that the layers were deposited slowly over thousands or millions of years. In the experience of your RSR radio hosts, evolutionists commonly respond to this hard evidence with mocking. See CRSQ June 2006, ICR Impact #316, and RSR 8-11-06 at KGOV.com. * Yellowstone Petrified Trees Sign Removed: The National Park Service removed their incorrect sign (see left and more). The NPS had claimed that in dozens of different strata over a 40-square mile area, many petrified trees were still standing where they had grown. The NPS eventually removed the sign partly because those petrified trees had no root systems, which they would have had if they had grown there. Instead, the trees of this "fossil forest" have roots that are abruptly broken off two or three feet from their trunks. If these mature trees actually had been remnants of sequential forests that had grown up in strata layer on top of strata layer, 27 times on Specimen Ridge (and 50 times at Specimen Creek), such a natural history implies passage of more time than permitted by biblical chronology. So, don't trust the National Park Service on historical science because they're wrong on the age of the Earth. * Wood Petrifies Quickly: Not surprisingly, by the common evolutionary knee-jerk claim of deep time, "several researchers believe that several millions of years are necessary for the complete formation of silicified wood". Our List of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things includes the work of five Japanese scientists who proved creationist research and published their results in the peer-reviewed journal Sedimentary Geology showing that wood can and does petrify rapidly. Modern wood significantly petrified in 36 years these researchers concluded that wood buried in strata could have been petrified in "a fairly short period of time, in the order of several tens to hundreds of years." * The Scablands: The primary surface features of the Scablands, which cover thousands of square miles of eastern Washington, were long believed to have formed gradually. Yet, against the determined claims of uniformitarian geologists, there is now overwhelming evidence as presented even in a NOVA TV program that the primary features of the Scablands formed rapidly from a catastrophic breach of Lake Missoula causing a massive regional flood. Of course evolutionary geologists still argue that the landscape was formed over tens of thousands of years, now by claiming there must have been a hundred Missoula floods. However, the evidence that there was Only One Lake Missoula Flood has been powerfully reinforced by a University of Colorado Ph.D. thesis. So the Scablands itself is no longer available to old-earthers as de facto evidence for the passage of millions of years. * The Heart Mountain Detachment: in Wyoming just east of Yellowstone, this mountain did not break apart slowly by uniformitarian processes but in only about half-an-hour as widely reported including in the evolutionist LiveScience.com, "Land Speed Record: Mountain Moves 62 Miles in 30 Minutes." The evidence indicates that this mountain of rock covering 425 square miles rapidly broke into 50 pieces and slid apart over an area of more than 1,300 square miles in a biblical, not a "geological," timeframe.  * "150 Million" year-old Squid Ink Not Decomposed: This still-writable ink had dehydrated but had not decomposed! The British Geological Survey's Dr. Phil Wilby, who excavated the fossil, said, "It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilised in three dimensions, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old." And the Daily Mail states that, "the black ink was of exactly the same structure as that of today's version", just desiccated. And Wilby added, "Normally you would find only the hard parts like the shell and bones fossilised but... these creatures... can be dissected as if they are living animals, you can see the muscle fibres and cells. It is difficult to imagine... The structure is similar to ink from a modern squid so we can write with it..." Why is this difficult for evolutionists to imagine? Because as Dr. Carl Wieland writes, "Chemical structures 'fall apart' all by themselves over time due to the randomizing effects of molecular motion."Decades ago Bob Enyart broadcast a geology program about Mount St. Helens' catastrophic destruction of forests and the hydraulic transportation and upright deposition of trees. Later, Bob met the chief ranger from Haleakala National Park on Hawaii's island of Maui, Mark Tanaka-Sanders. The ranger agreed to correspond with his colleague at Yellowstone to urge him to have the sign removed. Thankfully, it was then removed. (See also AIG, CMI, and all the original Yellowstone exhibit photos.) Groundbreaking research conducted by creation geologist Dr. Steve Austin in Spirit Lake after Mount St. Helens eruption provided a modern-day analog to the formation of Yellowstone fossil forest. A steam blast from that volcano blew over tens of thousands of trees leaving them without attached roots. Many thousands of those trees were floating upright in Spirit Lake, and began sinking at varying rates into rapidly and sporadically deposited sediments. Once Yellowstone's successive forest interpretation was falsified (though like with junk DNA, it's too big to fail, so many atheists and others still cling to it), the erroneous sign was removed. * Asiatic vs. European Honeybees: These two populations of bees have been separated supposedly for seven million years. A researcher decided to put the two together to see what would happen. What we should have here is a failure to communicate that would have resulted after their "language" evolved over millions of years. However, European and Asiatic honeybees are still able to communicate, putting into doubt the evolutionary claim that they were separated over "geologic periods." For more, see the Public Library of Science, Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees. (Oh yeah, and why don't fossils of poorly-formed honeycombs exist, from the millions of years before the bees and natural selection finally got the design right? Ha! Because they don't exist! :) Nautiloid proves rapid limestone formation. * Remember the Nautiloids: In the Grand Canyon there is a limestone layer averaging seven feet thick that runs the 277 miles of the canyon (and beyond) that covers hundreds of square miles and contains an average of one nautiloid fossil per square meter. Along with many other dead creatures in this one particular layer, 15% of these nautiloids were killed and then fossilized standing on their heads. Yes, vertically. They were caught in such an intense and rapid catastrophic flow that gravity was not able to cause all of their dead carcasses to fall over on their sides. Famed Mount St. Helens geologist Steve Austin is also the world's leading expert on nautiloid fossils and has worked in the canyon and presented his findings to the park's rangers at the invitation of National Park Service officials. Austin points out, as is true of many of the world's mass fossil graveyards, that this enormous nautiloid deposition provides indisputable proof of the extremely rapid formation of a significant layer of limestone near the bottom of the canyon, a layer like the others we've been told about, that allegedly formed at the bottom of a calm and placid sea with slow and gradual sedimentation. But a million nautiloids, standing on their heads, literally, would beg to differ. At our sister stie, RSR provides the relevant Geologic Society of America abstract, links, and video. *  Now It's Allegedly Two Million Year-Old Leaves: "When we started pulling leaves out of the soil, that was surreal, to know that it's millions of years old..." sur-re-al: adjective: a bizarre mix of fact and fantasy. In this case, the leaves are the facts. Earth scientists from Ohio State and the University of Minnesota say that wood and leaves they found in the Canadian Arctic are at least two million years old, and perhaps more than ten million years old, even though the leaves are just dry and crumbly and the wood still burns! * Gold Precipitates in Veins in Less than a Second: After geologists submitted for decades to the assumption that each layer of gold would deposit at the alleged super slow rates of geologic process, the journal Nature Geoscience reports that each layer of deposition can occur within a few tenths of a second. Meanwhile, at the Lihir gold deposit in Papua New Guinea, evolutionists assumed the more than 20 million ounces of gold in the Lihir reserve took millions of years to deposit, but as reported in the journal Science, geologists can now demonstrate that the deposit could have formed in thousands of years, or far more quickly! Iceland's not-so-old Surtsey Island looks ancient. * Surtsey Island, Iceland: Of the volcanic island that formed in 1963, New Scientist reported in 2007 about Surtsey that "geographers... marvel that canyons, gullies and other land features that typically take tens of thousands or millions of years to form were created in less than a decade." Yes. And Sigurdur Thorarinsson, Iceland's chief  geologist, wrote in the months after Surtsey formed, "that the time scale," he had been trained "to attach to geological developments is misleading." [For what is said to] take thousands of years... the same development may take a few weeks or even days here [including to form] a landscape... so varied and mature that it was almost beyond belief... wide sandy beaches and precipitous crags... gravel banks and lagoons, impressive cliffs… hollows, glens and soft undulating land... fractures and faultscarps, channels and screes… confounded by what met your eye... boulders worn by the surf, some of which were almost round... -Iceland's chief geologist * The Palouse River Gorge: In the southeast of Washington State, the Palouse River Gorge is one of many features formed rapidly by 500 cubic miles of water catastrophically released with the breaching of a natural dam in the Lake Missoula Flood (which gouged out the Scablands as described above). So, hard rock can be breached and eroded rapidly. * Leaf Shapes Identical for 190 Million Years?  From Berkley.edu, "Ginkgo biloba... dates back to... about 190 million years ago... fossilized leaf material from the Tertiary species Ginkgo adiantoides is considered similar or even identical to that produced by modern Ginkgo biloba trees... virtually indistinguishable..." The literature describes leaf shapes as "spectacularly diverse" sometimes within a species but especially across the plant kingdom. Because all kinds of plants survive with all kinds of different leaf shapes, the conservation of a species retaining a single shape over alleged deep time is a telling issue. Darwin's theory is undermined by the unchanging shape over millions of years of a species' leaf shape. This lack of change, stasis in what should be an easily morphable plant trait, supports the broader conclusion that chimp-like creatures did not become human beings and all the other ambitious evolutionary creation of new kinds are simply imagined. (Ginkgo adiantoides and biloba are actually the same species. Wikipedia states, "It is doubtful whether the Northern Hemisphere fossil species of Ginkgo can be reliably distinguished." For oftentimes, as documented by Dr. Carl Werner in his Evolution: The Grand Experiment series, paleontogists falsely speciate identical specimens, giving different species names, even different genus names, to the fossil and living animals that appear identical.) * Box Canyon, Idaho: Geologists now think Box Canyon in Idaho, USA, was carved by a catastrophic flood and not slowly over millions of years with 1) huge plunge pools formed by waterfalls; 2) the almost complete removal of large basalt boulders from the canyon; 3) an eroded notch on the plateau at the top of the canyon; and 4) water scour marks on the basalt plateau leading to the canyon. Scientists calculate that the flood was so large that it could have eroded the whole canyon in as little as 35 days. See the journal Science, Formation of Box Canyon, Idaho, by Megaflood, and the Journal of Creation, and Creation Magazine. * Manganese Nodules Rapid Formation: Allegedly, as claimed at the Wikipedia entry from 2005 through 2021: "Nodule growth is one of the slowest of all geological phenomena – in the order of a centimeter over several million years." Wow, that would be slow! And a Texas A&M Marine Sciences technical slide presentation says, “They grow very slowly (mm/million years) and can be tens of millions of years old", with RWU's oceanography textbook also putting it at "0.001 mm per thousand years." But according to a World Almanac documentary they have formed "around beer cans," said marine geologist Dr. John Yates in the 1997 video Universe Beneath the Sea: The Next Frontier. There are also reports of manganese nodules forming around ships sunk in the First World War. See more at at youngearth.com, at TOL, in the print edition of the Journal of Creation, and in this typical forum discussion with atheists (at the Chicago Cubs forum no less :). * "6,000 year-old" Mitochondrial Eve: As the Bible calls "Eve... the mother of all living" (Gen. 3:20), genetic researchers have named the one woman from whom all humans have descended "Mitochondrial Eve." But in a scientific attempt to date her existence, they openly admit that they included chimpanzee DNA in their analysis in order to get what they viewed as a reasonably old date of 200,000 years ago (which is still surprisingly recent from their perspective, but old enough not to strain Darwinian theory too much). But then as widely reported including by Science magazine, when they dropped the chimp data and used only actual human mutation rates, that process determined that Eve lived only six thousand years ago! In Ann Gibbon's Science article, "Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," rather than again using circular reasoning by assuming their conclusion (that humans evolved from ape-like creatures), they performed their calculations using actual measured mutation rates. This peer-reviewed journal then reported that if these rates have been constant, "mitochondrial Eve… would be a mere 6000 years old." See also the journal Nature and creation.com's "A shrinking date for Eve," and Walt Brown's assessment. Expectedly though, evolutionists have found a way to reject their own unbiased finding (the conclusion contrary to their self-interest) by returning to their original method of using circular reasoning, as reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics, "calibrating against recent evidence for the divergence time of humans and chimpanzees,"  to reset their mitochondrial clock back to 200,000 years. * Even Younger Y-Chromosomal Adam: (Although he should be called, "Y-Chromosomal Noah.") While we inherit our mtDNA only from our mothers, only men have a Y chromosome (which incidentally genetically disproves the claim that the fetus is "part of the woman's body," since the little boy's y chromosome could never be part of mom's body). Based on documented mutation rates on and the extraordinary lack of mutational differences in this specifically male DNA, the Y-chromosomal Adam would have lived only a few thousand years ago! (He's significantly younger than mtEve because of the genetic bottleneck of the global flood.) Yet while the Darwinian camp wrongly claimed for decades that humans were 98% genetically similar to chimps, secular scientists today, using the same type of calculation only more accurately, have unintentionally documented that chimps are about as far genetically from what makes a human being a male, as mankind itself is from sponges! Geneticists have found now that sponges are 70% the same as humans genetically, and separately, that human and chimp Y chromosomes are  "horrendously" 30%

Listen to the latest on System76 computers, manufacturing, and Pop!_OS.This episode welcomes guest Massimo Pascale from UC Berkeley to discuss his work and research around the sunburst arc, super star clusters and Nitrogen-enriched Nebula. Learn how the Lemur Pro and open source software powers some of his research.Check out what we make!Blog: blog.system76.comLaptops: s76.co/WuEDOnoSDesktops: s76.co/Zn4NXTf9Pop!_OS: s76.co/D_IWRvWDShare what you make with us!twitter.com/system76facebook.com/system76instagram.com/system76_com

Let's explore the Milky Way!  Star Clusters and Nebulae abound in this month's podcast. Follow us at facebook.com/BackyardAstronomerAZ Check out the NAZ Astro mission of STEM education at facebook.com/NAZAstro Support STEM education patreon.com/NAZAstro Our awesome sponsors: facebook.com/prescottrockstars facebook.com/manzanitains

Get Exclusive Episode Of Space Infinite Podcast - https://forms.gle/rnpoMif7SRLs39MR8 #97. Star Clusters! In Hindi What are Star Clusters? What is the difference between an Open Cluster and Globular Cluster?- Learn about it in this episode of the space infinite podcast! Connect on Instagram - @itssmbh - https://www.instagram.com/itssmbh/

On today's episode, we're going to range out into the cosmos for our inaugural episode in the world of astrobiology! We're going to ask the question: how many people could our galaxy support? Using some assumptions and approximations, we're going to see that the number dwarfs our current numbers here on Earth by quite some margin... 1) Asimov, I. (1952, 2016 edition), Foundation and Empire. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 2) Briggs, J. C. (2017), Emergence of a sixth mass extinction? Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 122: 243- 248. 3) Chamie, J. (2022), Population Levels, Trends and Differentials: More Important Population Matters. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland AG. 4) Chu, J., MIT News (2023), Astronomers snap first ever image of supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (online) [Accessed 02/07/2023]. 5) Cowie, R. H., Bouchet, P. and Fontaine, B. (2022): The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation? Biological Reviews 97: 640- 663. 6) de Almeida, G. (2004), The Milky Way. Chapter in: Navigating the Night Sky. Patrick Moore's Practical Astronomy Series. London: Springer. 7) The Editors of Scientific American (2015), Exoplanets: Worlds Without End. New York: Scientific American. 8) Hodge, P. W. (1981), The Andromeda Galaxy. Scientific American 244(1): 92-101. 9) Hodge, P. W., Encyclopedia Britannica (2017), Magellanic Cloud (online) [Accessed 02/07/2023]. 10) Hodge, P. W., Encyclopedia Britannica (2023), Milky Way Galaxy (online) [Accessed 02/07/2023]. 11) Kurzgesagt- In a Nutshell, YouTube (2022), The Last Human- A Glimpse Into The Far Future (online) [Accessed 02/07/2023]. 12) Ramakrishna, S. (2021), Circular economy and sustainability pathways to build a new-modern society. Drying Technology 39(6): 711-712. 13) Ritchie, H., Our World in Data (2023), The UN has made population projections for more than 50 years- how accurate have they been? (online) [Accessed 02/07/2023]. 14) Sender, R., Fuchs, S. and Milo, R. (2016), Revised estimates for the number of human and bacteria cells in the body. PLOS Biology 14(8): e1002533. 15) Stellato, J. (2020), The Milky Way and Lentil Beans. Science Scope 43(6): 44- 49. 16) Stevenson, D. (2015), Milkomeda and the Fate of the Milky Way. Chapter in: The Complex Lives of Star Clusters. Astronomers' Universe. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. 17) University of Göttingen, Phys.org (2021), Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel (online) [Accessed 02/07/2023]. 18) van den Heuvel, E. (2016), How Distant Are the Stars? Chapter in: The Amazing Unity of the Universe. Astronomers' Universe. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. 19) Author unknown, NASA Exoplanet Exploration: Planets Beyond Our Solar System (date unknown, updated July 2023), Discovery (online) [Accessed 02/07/2023]. 20) Author unknown, United Nations (2022), Day of Eight Billion, 15 November 2022 (online) [Accessed 02/07/2023]. 21) Author unknown, Wikipedia (date unknown), Names of large numbers (online) [Accessed 02/07/2023].

The initial spin distribution of B-type stars revealed by the split main sequences of young star clusters by Chen Wang et al. on Wednesday 30 November Spectroscopic observations of stars in young open clusters have revealed evidence for a dichotomous distribution of stellar rotational velocities, with 10-30% of stars rotating slowly and the remaining 70-90% rotating fairly rapidly. At the same time, high-precision multiband photometry of young star clusters shows a split main sequence band, which is again interpreted as due to a spin dichotomy. Recent papers suggest that extreme rotation is required to retrieve the photometric split. Our new grids of MESA models and the prevalent SYCLIST models show, however, that initial slow (0-35% of the linear Keplerian rotation velocities) and intermediate (50-65% of the Keplerian rotation velocities) rotation are adequate to explain the photometric split. These values are consistent with the recent spectroscopic measurements of cluster and field stars, and are likely to reflect the birth spin distributions of upper main-sequence stars. A fraction of the initially faster-rotating stars may be able to reach near-critical rotation at the end of their main-sequence evolution and produce Be stars in the turn-off region of young star clusters. However, we find that the presence of Be stars up to two magnitudes below the cluster turnoff advocates for a crucial role of binary interaction in creating Be stars. We argue that surface chemical composition measurements may help distinguish these two Be star formation channels. While only the most rapidly rotating, and therefore nitrogen-enriched, single stars can evolve into Be stars, slow pre-mass-transfer rotation and inefficient accretion allows for mild or no enrichment even in critically rotating accretion-induced Be stars. Our results shed new light on the origin of the spin distribution of young and evolved B-type main sequence stars. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15794v1

Formation of star clusters and enrichment by massive stars in simulations of low-metallicity galaxies with a fully sampled initial stellar mass function by Natalia Lahén et al. on Wednesday 30 November We present new GRIFFIN project hydrodynamical simulations that model the formation of galactic star cluster populations in low-metallicity ($Z=0.00021$) dwarf galaxies, including radiation, supernova and stellar wind feedback of individual massive stars. In the simulations, stars are sampled from the stellar initial mass function (IMF) down to the hydrogen burning limit of 0.08 M$_odot$. Mass conservation is enforced within a radius of 1 pc for the formation massive stars. We find that massive stars are preferentially found in star clusters and follow a correlation set at birth between the highest initial stellar mass and the star cluster mass, in agreement with observations. With a fully sampled IMF, star clusters loose mass in the galactic tidal field according to mass-loss rates observed in nearby galaxies. Of the released stellar feedback, 60% of the supernova material and up to 35% of the wind material reside either in the hot interstellar medium (ISM) or in gaseous, metal enriched outflows. While stellar winds (instantaneously) and supernovae (delayed) start enriching the ISM right after the first massive stars form, the formation of supernova-enriched stars is significantly delayed (by $>50$ Myr) compared to the formation of stars enriched by stellar winds. The first forming star clusters are therefore solely enriched by stellar wind material. Overall, supernova ejecta dominate the enrichment by mass, while the number of enriched stars is determined by continuous stellar winds. These results present a concept for the formation of chemically distinct populations of stars in bound star clusters, reminiscent of multiple populations in globular clusters. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15705v1

PHANGS-JWST First Results: Dust embedded star clusters in NGC 7496 selected via 3 3 μ m PAH emission by Jimena Rodriguez et al. on Wednesday 30 November The earliest stages of star formation occur enshrouded in dust and are not observable in the optical. Here we leverage the extraordinary new high-resolution infrared imaging from JWST to begin the study of dust-embedded star clusters in nearby galaxies throughout the local volume. We present a technique for identifying dust-embedded clusters in NGC 7496 (18.7 Mpc), the first galaxy to be observed by the PHANGS-JWST Cycle 1 Treasury Survey. We select sources that have strong 3.3$mu$m PAH emission based on a $rm F300M-F335M$ color excess, and identify 67 candidate embedded clusters. Only eight of these are found in the PHANGS-HST optically-selected cluster catalog and all are young (six have SED-fit ages of $sim1$ Myr). We find that this sample of embedded cluster candidates may significantly increase the census of young clusters in NGC 7496 from the PHANGS-HST catalog -- the number of clusters younger than $sim$2 Myr could be increased by a factor of two. Candidates are preferentially located in dust lanes, and are coincident with peaks in PHANGS-ALMA CO (2-1) maps. We take a first look at concentration indices, luminosity functions, SEDs spanning from 2700A to 21$mu$m, and stellar masses (estimated to be between $sim10^4-10^5 M_{odot}$). The methods tested here provide a basis for future work to derive accurate constraints on the physical properties of embedded clusters, characterize the completeness of cluster samples, and expand analysis to all 19 galaxies in the PHANGS-JWST sample, which will enable basic unsolved problems in star formation and cluster evolution to be addressed. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13426v2

PHANGS-JWST First Results: Dust embedded star clusters in NGC 7496 selected via 3 3 μ m PAH emission by Jimena Rodriguez et al. on Tuesday 29 November The earliest stages of star formation occur enshrouded in dust and are not observable in the optical. Here we leverage the extraordinary new high-resolution infrared imaging from JWST to begin the study of dust-embedded star clusters in nearby galaxies throughout the local volume. We present a technique for identifying dust-embedded clusters in NGC 7496 (18.7 Mpc), the first galaxy to be observed by the PHANGS-JWST Cycle 1 Treasury Survey. We select sources that have strong 3.3$mu$m PAH emission based on a $rm F300M-F335M$ color excess, and identify 67 candidate embedded clusters. Only eight of these are found in the PHANGS-HST optically-selected cluster catalog and all are young (six have SED-fit ages of $sim1$ Myr). We find that this sample of embedded cluster candidates may significantly increase the census of young clusters in NGC 7496 from the PHANGS-HST catalog -- the number of clusters younger than $sim$2 Myr could be increased by a factor of two. Candidates are preferentially located in dust lanes, and are coincident with peaks in PHANGS-ALMA CO (2-1) maps. We take a first look at concentration indices, luminosity functions, SEDs spanning from 2700A to 21$mu$m, and stellar masses (estimated to be between $sim10^4-10^5 M_{odot}$). The methods tested here provide a basis for future work to derive accurate constraints on the physical properties of embedded clusters, characterize the completeness of cluster samples, and expand analysis to all 19 galaxies in the PHANGS-JWST sample, which will enable basic unsolved problems in star formation and cluster evolution to be addressed. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13426v2

Formation of star clusters and enrichment by massive stars in simulations of low-metallicity galaxies with a fully sampled initial stellar mass function by Natalia Lahén et al. on Tuesday 29 November We present new GRIFFIN project hydrodynamical simulations that model the formation of galactic star cluster populations in low-metallicity ($Z=0.00021$) dwarf galaxies, including radiation, supernova and stellar wind feedback of individual massive stars. In the simulations, stars are sampled from the stellar initial mass function (IMF) down to the hydrogen burning limit of 0.08 M$_odot$. Mass conservation is enforced within a radius of 1 pc for the formation massive stars. We find that massive stars are preferentially found in star clusters and follow a correlation set at birth between the highest initial stellar mass and the star cluster mass, in agreement with observations. With a fully sampled IMF, star clusters loose mass in the galactic tidal field according to mass-loss rates observed in nearby galaxies. Of the released stellar feedback, 60% of the supernova material and up to 35% of the wind material reside either in the hot interstellar medium (ISM) or in gaseous, metal enriched outflows. While stellar winds (instantaneously) and supernovae (delayed) start enriching the ISM right after the first massive stars form, the formation of supernova-enriched stars is significantly delayed (by $>50$ Myr) compared to the formation of stars enriched by stellar winds. The first forming star clusters are therefore solely enriched by stellar wind material. Overall, supernova ejecta dominate the enrichment by mass, while the number of enriched stars is determined by continuous stellar winds. These results present a concept for the formation of chemically distinct populations of stars in bound star clusters, reminiscent of multiple populations in globular clusters. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15705v1

The initial spin distribution of B-type stars revealed by the split main sequences of young star clusters by Chen Wang et al. on Tuesday 29 November Spectroscopic observations of stars in young open clusters have revealed evidence for a dichotomous distribution of stellar rotational velocities, with 10-30% of stars rotating slowly and the remaining 70-90% rotating fairly rapidly. At the same time, high-precision multiband photometry of young star clusters shows a split main sequence band, which is again interpreted as due to a spin dichotomy. Recent papers suggest that extreme rotation is required to retrieve the photometric split. Our new grids of MESA models and the prevalent SYCLIST models show, however, that initial slow (0-35% of the linear Keplerian rotation velocities) and intermediate (50-65% of the Keplerian rotation velocities) rotation are adequate to explain the photometric split. These values are consistent with the recent spectroscopic measurements of cluster and field stars, and are likely to reflect the birth spin distributions of upper main-sequence stars. A fraction of the initially faster-rotating stars may be able to reach near-critical rotation at the end of their main-sequence evolution and produce Be stars in the turn-off region of young star clusters. However, we find that the presence of Be stars up to two magnitudes below the cluster turnoff advocates for a crucial role of binary interaction in creating Be stars. We argue that surface chemical composition measurements may help distinguish these two Be star formation channels. While only the most rapidly rotating, and therefore nitrogen-enriched, single stars can evolve into Be stars, slow pre-mass-transfer rotation and inefficient accretion allows for mild or no enrichment even in critically rotating accretion-induced Be stars. Our results shed new light on the origin of the spin distribution of young and evolved B-type main sequence stars. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15794v1

PHANGS-JWST First Results: Dust embedded star clusters in NGC 7496 selected via 3 3 μ m PAH emission by Jimena Rodriguez et al. on Tuesday 29 November The earliest stages of star formation occur enshrouded in dust and are not observable in the optical. Here we leverage the extraordinary new high-resolution infrared imaging from JWST to begin the study of dust-embedded star clusters in nearby galaxies throughout the local volume. We present a technique for identifying dust-embedded clusters in NGC 7496 (18.7 Mpc), the first galaxy to be observed by the PHANGS-JWST Cycle 1 Treasury Survey. We select sources that have strong 3.3$mu$m PAH emission based on a $rm F300M-F335M$ color excess, and identify 67 candidate embedded clusters. Only eight of these are found in the PHANGS-HST optically-selected cluster catalog and all are young (six have SED-fit ages of $sim1$ Myr). We find that this sample of embedded cluster candidates may significantly increase the census of young clusters in NGC 7496 from the PHANGS-HST catalog -- the number of clusters younger than $sim$2 Myr could be increased by a factor of two. Candidates are preferentially located in dust lanes, and are coincident with peaks in PHANGS-ALMA CO (2-1) maps. We take a first look at concentration indices, luminosity functions, SEDs spanning from 2700A to 21$mu$m, and stellar masses (estimated to be between $sim10^4-10^5 M_{odot}$). The methods tested here provide a basis for future work to derive accurate constraints on the physical properties of embedded clusters, characterize the completeness of cluster samples, and expand analysis to all 19 galaxies in the PHANGS-JWST sample, which will enable basic unsolved problems in star formation and cluster evolution to be addressed. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13426v2

Comparing hierarchical black hole mergers in star clusters and active galactic nuclei by Guo-Peng Li et al. on Tuesday 22 November Star clusters (SCs) and active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are promising sites for the occurrence of hierarchical black hole (BH) mergers. We use simple models to compare hierarchical BH mergers in two of the dynamical formation channels. We find that the primary mass distribution of hierarchical mergers in AGNs is higher than that in SCs, with the peaks of $sim$$13~M_{odot}$ and $sim$$50~M_{odot}$, respectively. The effective spin ($chi_{rm eff}$) distribution of hierarchical mergers in SCs is symmetrical around zero as expected and $sim$50% of the mergers have $|chi_{rm eff}|>0.2$. The distribution of $chi_{rm eff}$ in AGNs is narrow and prefers positive values with the peak of $chi_{rm eff}ge0.3$ due to the assistance of AGN disks. BH hierarchical growth efficiency, with at least $sim$30% of mergers being hierarchies in AGNs, is much higher than the efficiency in SCs. We argue that the majority of the hierarchical merger candidates detected by LIGO-Virgo may originate from the AGN channel. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11150v1

JWST NIRCam Probes Young Star Clusters in the Reionization Era Sunrise Arc by E. Vanzella et al. on Monday 21 November Star cluster formation in the early universe and their contribution to reionization remains to date largely unconstrained. Here we present JWST/NIRCam imaging of the most highly magnified galaxy known at z ~ 6, the Sunrise arc. We identify six young massive star clusters (YMCs) with measured radii spanning ~ 20 pc down to ~ 1 pc (corrected for lensing magnification), estimated stellar masses of ~ $10^{(6-7)}$ Msun, and with ages 1-30 Myr based on SED fitting to photometry measured in 8 filters extending to rest-frame 7000A. The resulting stellar mass surface densities are higher than 1000 Msun pc$^{-2}$ (up to a few $10^5$ Msun pc$^{-2}$) and their inferred dynamical ages qualify the majority of these systems as gravitationally-bound stellar clusters. The star cluster ages map the progression of star formation along the arc, with to evolved systems (>~ 10 Myr old) followed by very young clusters. The youngest stellar clusters (< 5 Myr) show evidence of prominent Hbeta + [OIII]4959,5007 emission, based on photometry, with equivalent widths larger than 1000 A rest-frame, and are hosted in a 200 pc sized star-forming complex. Such a region dominates the ionizing photon production, with a high efficiency log($xi_{ion}$ [Hz erg$^{-1}$]) ~ 25.7. A significant fraction of the recently formed stellar mass of the galaxy (> 10-30 %) occurred in these YMCs. We speculate that such sources of ionizing radiation boost the ionizing photon production efficiency which eventually carve ionized channels that might favor the escape of Lyman continuum radiation. The survival of some of the clusters would make them the progenitors of massive and relatively metal-poor globular clusters in the local Universe. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09839v1

Comparing hierarchical black hole mergers in star clusters and active galactic nuclei by Guo-Peng Li et al. on Monday 21 November Star clusters (SCs) and active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are promising sites for the occurrence of hierarchical black hole (BH) mergers. We use simple models to compare hierarchical BH mergers in two of the dynamical formation channels. We find that the primary mass distribution of hierarchical mergers in AGNs is higher than that in SCs, with the peaks of $sim$$13~M_{odot}$ and $sim$$50~M_{odot}$, respectively. The effective spin ($chi_{rm eff}$) distribution of hierarchical mergers in SCs is symmetrical around zero as expected and $sim$50% of the mergers have $|chi_{rm eff}|>0.2$. The distribution of $chi_{rm eff}$ in AGNs is narrow and prefers positive values with the peak of $chi_{rm eff}ge0.3$ due to the assistance of AGN disks. BH hierarchical growth efficiency, with at least $sim$30% of mergers being hierarchies in AGNs, is much higher than the efficiency in SCs. We argue that the majority of the hierarchical merger candidates detected by LIGO-Virgo may originate from the AGN channel. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11150v1

Astronomy Daily – The PodcastShow NotesS01E47Astronomy Daily – The Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/astronomy-daily-the-podcast/id1642258990 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2kPF1ABBW2rCrjDlU2CWLW Andrew's taking a short holiday…so for the next little while Astronomy Daily – The Podcast is being hosted by his brother Steve…and Halley of course.Monday October 31, 2022Today's headline stories:- Open Star Clusters pose a puzzle for researchers - Is Newton being shown the back door?- Astronaut first… Never has an astronaut been arrested or charged with kidnapping or attempted murder, until now, according to police.- Dust storms on Mars damage Rover… She's a hardy little trooper and the dust storms on Mars can be mean but she's still sending data.- Spooky stuff happening at the edge of the Solar System… They say it's weird… reason enough to send a probe.- Hubble's most famous image, the Deep Field Image is getting a do-over… new processing techniques are bringing out MORE… yes… MORE!If you'd like to find out more about the stories featured in today's show, you can read today's edition of the Astronomy Daily Newsletter at any of our websites – www.spacenuts.io , www.bitesz.com or go directly to www.astronomydaily.io – subscribe and get the new edition delivered to your mailbox or RSS reader every day….it's free from us to you.Please subscribe to the podcast and if you have a moment, a quick review would be most helpful. Thank you…#space #astronomy #science #podcast #astronomydaily #spacenuts #spacetime

Intermediate-mass Black Holes on the Run from Young Star Clusters by Elena González Prieto et al. on Tuesday 18 October The existence of black holes (BHs) with masses in the range between stellar remnants and supermassive BHs has only recently become unambiguously established. GW190521, a gravitational wave signal detected by the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration, provides the first direct evidence for the existence of such intermediate-mass BHs (IMBHs). This event sparked and continues to fuel discussion on the possible formation channels for such massive BHs. As the detection revealed, IMBHs can form via binary mergers of BHs in the "upper mass gap" ($approx40 -120,M_{odot}$). Alternatively, IMBHs may form via the collapse of a very massive star formed through stellar collisions and mergers in dense star clusters. In this study, we explore the formation of IMBHs with masses between $120$ and $500,M_{odot}$ in young, massive star clusters using state-of-the-art Cluster Monte Carlo ($texttt{CMC}$) models. We examine the evolution of IMBHs throughout their dynamical lifetimes, ending with their ejection from the parent cluster due to gravitational radiation recoil from BH mergers, or dynamical recoil kicks from few-body scattering encounters. We find that $ textit{all}$ of the IMBHs in our models are ejected from the host cluster within the first $sim 500$ Myr, indicating a low retention probability of IMBHs in this mass range for globular clusters today. We estimate the peak IMBH merger rate to be $mathcal{R} approx 2 , rm{Gpc}^{-3},rm{yr}^{-1}$ at redshift $z approx 2$. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07881v2

GOALS-JWST: Revealing the Buried Star Clusters in the Luminous Infrared Galaxy VV 114 by Sean T. Linden et al. on Wednesday 12 October We present the results of a {it James Webb Space Telescope} NIRCam investigation into the young massive star cluster (YMC) population in the luminous infrared galaxy VV 114. We identify 374 compact YMC candidates with a $S/N geq 3$, 5, and 5 at F150W, F200W, and F356W respectively. A direct comparison with our {it HST} cluster catalog reveals that $sim 20%$ of these sources are undetected at optical wavelengths. Based on {it yggdrasil} stellar population models, we identify 16 YMCs in our {it JWST} catalog with F150W-F200W and F200W-F356W colors suggesting they are all very young ($1-4$ Myr), dusty ($A_{V} geq 5$), and massive ($10^{5.8} < M_{odot} < 10^{6.1}$). The discovery of these `hidden' sources, many of which are found in the `overlap' region between the two nuclei, triples the number of $t < 4 $ Myr clusters detected in VV 114. Extending the cluster age distribution ($dN/dtau propto tau^{gamma}$) to the youngest ages, we find a slope of $gamma = -1.27 pm 0.32$ for $10^{6} < tau (mathrm{yr}) < 10^{7}$, which is consistent with the previously determined value from $10^{7} < tau (mathrm{yr}) < 10^{8.5}$, and confirms that VV 114 has a steep age gradient for all massive star clusters across the entire range of cluster ages observed. Finally, the consistency between our {it JWST}- and {it HST}-derived age distribution slopes indicates that the balance between cluster formation and destruction has not been significantly altered in VV 114 over the last 0.5 Gyr. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05763v1

A novel generative method for star clusters from hydro-dynamical simulations by Stefano Torniamenti. on Tuesday 11 October Most stars form in clumpy and sub-structured clusters. These properties also emerge in hydro-dynamical simulations of star-forming clouds, which provide a way to generate realistic initial conditions for $N-$body runs of young stellar clusters. However, producing large sets of initial conditions by hydro-dynamical simulations is prohibitively expensive in terms of computational time. We introduce a novel technique for generating new initial conditions from a given sample of hydro-dynamical simulations, at a tiny computational cost. In particular, we apply a hierarchical clustering algorithm to learn a tree representation of the spatial and kinematic relations between stars, where the leaves represent the single stars and the nodes describe the structure of the cluster at larger and larger scales. This procedure can be used as a basis for the random generation of new sets of stars, by simply modifying the global structure of the stellar cluster, while leaving the small-scale properties unaltered. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04848v1

A novel generative method for star clusters from hydro-dynamical simulations by Stefano Torniamenti. on Tuesday 11 October Most stars form in clumpy and sub-structured clusters. These properties also emerge in hydro-dynamical simulations of star-forming clouds, which provide a way to generate realistic initial conditions for $N-$body runs of young stellar clusters. However, producing large sets of initial conditions by hydro-dynamical simulations is prohibitively expensive in terms of computational time. We introduce a novel technique for generating new initial conditions from a given sample of hydro-dynamical simulations, at a tiny computational cost. In particular, we apply a hierarchical clustering algorithm to learn a tree representation of the spatial and kinematic relations between stars, where the leaves represent the single stars and the nodes describe the structure of the cluster at larger and larger scales. This procedure can be used as a basis for the random generation of new sets of stars, by simply modifying the global structure of the stellar cluster, while leaving the small-scale properties unaltered. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04848v1

Nick gives stargazing shows all across Oahu with his company, Stargazers of Hawaii. We talk about how he left his career in construction to pursue his passion in astronomy. He answers my questions about the universe, distant galaxies, what the coolest thing he's seen, and yes, we talk ALIENS! He also shares about his other […]

Dynamics of binary black holes in young star clusters: the impact of cluster mass and long-term evolution by Stefano Torniamenti et al. on Thursday 22 September Dynamical interactions in dense star clusters are considered one of the most effective formation channels of binary black holes (BBHs). Here, we present direct $N-$body simulations of two different star cluster families: low-mass ($sim{500-800}$ M$_odot$) and relatively high-mass star clusters ($ge{5000}$ M$_odot$). We show that the formation channels of BBHs in low- and high-mass star clusters are extremely different and lead to two completely distinct populations of BBH mergers. Low-mass clusters host mainly low-mass BBHs born from binary evolution, while BBHs in high-mass clusters are relatively massive (chirp mass up to $sim{100}$ M$_odot$) and driven by dynamical exchanges. Tidal disruption dramatically quenches the formation and dynamical evolution of BBHs in low-mass clusters on a very short timescale ($lesssim{100}$ Myr), while BBHs in high-mass clusters undergo effective dynamical hardening until the end of our simulations (1.5 Gyr). In high-mass clusters we find that 8% of BBHs have primary mass in the pair-instability mass gap, all of them born via stellar collisions, while only one BBH with primary mass in the mass gap forms in low-mass clusters. These differences are crucial for the interpretation of the formation channels of gravitational-wave sources. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.08163v2

Unveiling hidden stellar aggregates in the Milky Way: 1656 new star clusters found in Gaia EDR3 by Zhihong He et al. on Monday 19 September We report 1,656 new star clusters found in the Galactic disk (|b|

Fundamentals of Stellar Parameters Estimation through CMD of Star Clusters: Open NGC2360 and Globular NGC 5272 by Kanwar Preet Kaur et al. on Wednesday 07 September The fundamentals of estimating essential stellar parameters of an open cluster-NGC 2360 and globular clusters-NGC 5272 are presented extensively in this work. Here, the evaluation of stellar parameters, by manually fitting the appropriate isochrones on the color magnitude diagrams (CMDs), of the selected star clusters is discussed comprehensively. Aperture photometry and PSF fitting photometry are conducted on g, r, and i standard band filter images of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) using the aperture photometry tool (APT) to obtain the respective CMDs. Further, to achieve the stellar parameters, isochrone fitting is described in detail. This work on stellar parameters evaluation has attained the following results: age of NGC 2360 is found to be 708 Myrs with metallicity, [Fe/H], of -0.15, whereas NGC 5272 is having age of 11.56 Gyrs with metallicity, [Fe/H], of -1.57. Additionally, the interstellar reddening, E(B-V), and distance modulus, DM, for NGC 2360 are obtained as 0.12 and 11.65, respectively. While, for NGC 5272, the interstellar reddening is attained as E(B-V)=0.015, and the distance modulus is DM=15.1. The values of these stellar parameters are found to be in close approximation with the results provided in the literature based on the IRAF analysis technique. The distribution of radii, masses, and temperatures are included along with the initial mass function (IMF) for both the start clusters. Thus, this article would aid in providing insight into the evaluation of stellar parameters by the astronomical photometry analysis which would successively upsurge the understanding of our universe. It should be noted that the cleaning of cluster population on the CMDs from the foreground/background stars, clearing of spurious objects, error estimations and the membership determination are not carried out in this work and are considered as separate project for analysis. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.03019v1

PHANGS: Constraining Star Formation Timescales Using the Spatial Correlations of Star Clusters and Giant Molecular Clouds by Jordan A. Turner et al. on Wednesday 07 September In the hierarchical view of star formation, giant molecular gas clouds (GMCs) undergo fragmentation to form small-scale structures made up of stars and star clusters. Here we study the connection between young star clusters and cold gas across a range of extragalactic environments by combining the high resolution (1") PHANGS-ALMA catalogue of GMCs with the star cluster catalogues from PHANGS-HST. The star clusters are spatially matched with the GMCs across a sample of 11 nearby star-forming galaxies with a range of galactic environments (centres, bars, spiral arms, etc.). We find that after 4-6 Myr the star clusters are no longer associated with any gas clouds. Additionally, we measure the autocorrelation of the star clusters and GMCs as well as their cross-correlation to quantify the fractal nature of hierarchical star formation. Young ($leq$ 10 Myr) star clusters are more strongly autocorrelated on kpc and smaller spatial scales than the >10 Myr stellar populations, indicating that the hierarchical structure dissolves over time. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02872v1

May 22, 2022: The moon is near Saturn in the southeast before sunup. During the next few mornings watch it skip past Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. After nightfall, spot star clusters with a binocular. This episode is also available as a blog post: 2022, May 22: Moon Visits Morning Planets, Evening Star Clusters --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jeffrey-l-hunt/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeffrey-l-hunt/support

May 21, 2022: The moon nears the morning planets – Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn. After sundown, find two star clusters near Leo – the Beehive cluster and the Coma cluster. This episode is also available as a blog post: 2022, May 21: Moon, Morning Planets, Evening Star Clusters --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jeffrey-l-hunt/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeffrey-l-hunt/support

Dr. Annapurni Subramaniam serves as the Director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore. Her research work focuses on Star Clusters, Stellar Evolution and Population in Galaxies and Magellanic Clouds. In this episode, Dr. Annapurni speaks to us about her childhood fascination with the night sky, her thoughts on a long-term vision for Scientific Research in India, and balancing leadership and contributor roles in projects with grace and humility.

101 Dimensions curated by Anthony Rowsick, November 2021:1. Vangelis – Atlas's Push; Inside Our Perspectives; Out In Space; Juno's Quiet Determination; and Jupiter's Intuition (20:43) (from the album Juno To Jupiter, 2021)2. Public Service Broadcasting – Lichtspiel I – Opus; Lichtspiel II – Schwarz Weiss Grau; Lichtspiel III – Symphonie Diagonale; and Ich Und Die Stadt (17:39) (from the album Bright Magic, 2021)3. Kosmogon – Somnus (22:57) (from the album Mässan, 2021)4. Edgar Froese – Tropic of Capricorn (20:44) (from the album Ages, 1978)5. David Bedford - Star Clusters, Nebulae & Places In Devon (25:03) (from the album Star Clusters, Nebulae & Places In Devon / The Song Of The White Horse, 1983)I hope you will join me for nearly 2 hours of electronic, ambient, progressive music!

[While Bob & Cheryl Enyart go fishing we invite you to enjoy from the RSR archives our favorite List of Not So Old Things! Photos from today, June 25, 2021.] -- Finches Diversify in Decades, Opals Form in Months,  Man's Genetic Diversity in 200 Generations, C-14 Everywhere: Real Science Radio hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams present their classic program that led to the audience-favorites rsr.org/list-shows! See below and hear on today's radio program our list of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things! From opals forming in months to man's genetic diversity in 200 generations, and with carbon 14 everywhere it's not supposed to be (including in diamonds and dinosaur bones!), scientific observations fill the guys' most traditional list challenging those who claim that the earth is billions of years old. Many of these scientific finds demand a re-evaluation of supposed million and billion-year ages. * Finches Adapt in 17 Years, Not 2.3 Million: Charles Darwin's finches are claimed to have taken 2,300,000 years to diversify from an initial species blown onto the Galapagos Islands. Yet individuals from a single finch species on a U.S. Bird Reservation in the Pacific were introduced to a group of small islands 300 miles away and in at most 17 years, like Darwin's finches, they had diversified their beaks, related muscles, and behavior to fill various ecological niches. Hear about this also at rsr.org/spetner. * Opals Can Form in "A Few Months" And Don't Need 100,000 Years: A leading authority on opals, Allan W. Eckert, observed that, "scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands... Not true." A 2011 peer-reviewed paper in a geology journal from Australia, where almost all the world's opal is found, reported on the: "new timetable for opal formation involving weeks to a few months and not the hundreds of thousands of years envisaged by the conventional weathering model." (And apparently, per a 2019 report from Entomology Today, opals can even form around insects!) More knowledgeable scientists resist the uncritical, group-think insistence on false super-slow formation rates (as also for manganese nodules, gold veins, stone, petroleum, canyons and gullies, and even guts, all below). Regarding opals, Darwinian bias led geologists to long ignore possible quick action, as from microbes, as a possible explanation for these mineraloids. For both in nature and in the lab, opals form rapidly, not even in 10,000 years, but in weeks. See this also from creationists by a geologist, a paleobiochemist, and a nuclear chemist. * Finches Speciate in Two Generations vs Two Million Years for Darwin's Birds?  Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands are said to have diversified into 14 species over a period of two million years. But in 2017 the journal Science reported a newcomer to the Island which within two generations spawned a reproductively isolated new species. In another instance as documented by Lee Spetner, a hundred birds of the same finch species introduced to an island cluster a 1,000 kilometers from Galapagos diversified into species with the typical variations in beak sizes, etc. "If this diversification occurred in less than seventeen years," Dr. Spetner asks, "why did Darwin's Galapagos finches [as claimed by evolutionists] have to take two million years?" * Blue Eyes Originated Not So Long Ago: Not a million years ago, nor a hundred thousand years ago, but based on a peer-reviewed paper in Human Genetics, a press release at Science Daily reports that, "research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today." * Adding the Entire Universe to our List of Not So Old Things? Based on March 2019 findings from Hubble, Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and his co-authors in the Astrophysical Journal estimate that the universe is about a billion years younger than previously thought! Then in September 2019 in the journal Science, the age dropped precipitiously to as low as 11.4 billion years! Of course, these measurements also further squeeze the canonical story of the big bang chronology with its many already existing problems including the insufficient time to "evolve" distant mature galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, enormous black holes, filaments, bubbles, walls, and other superstructures. So, even though the latest estimates are still absurdly too old (Google: big bang predictions, and click on the #1 ranked article, or just go on over there to rsr.org/bb), regardless, we thought we'd plop the whole universe down on our List of Not So Old Things!   * After the Soft Tissue Discoveries, NOW Dino DNA: When a North Carolina State University paleontologist took the Tyrannosaurus Rex photos to the right of original biological material, that led to the 2016 discovery of dinosaur DNA, So far researchers have also recovered dinosaur blood vessels, collagen, osteocytes, hemoglobin, red blood cells, and various proteins. As of May 2018, twenty-six scientific journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, PLoS One, Bone, and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, have confirmed the discovery of biomaterial fossils from many dinosaurs! Organisms including T. Rex, hadrosaur, titanosaur, triceratops, Lufengosaur, mosasaur, and Archaeopteryx, and many others dated, allegedly, even hundreds of millions of years old, have yielded their endogenous, still-soft biological material. See the web's most complete listing of 100+ journal papers (screenshot, left) announcing these discoveries at bflist.rsr.org and see it in layman's terms at rsr.org/soft. * Rapid Stalactites, Stalagmites, Etc.: A construction worker in 1954 left a lemonade bottle in one of Australia's famous Jenolan Caves. By 2011 it had been naturally transformed into a stalagmite (below, right). Increasing scientific knowledge is arguing for rapid cave formation (see below, Nat'l Park Service shrinks Carlsbad Caverns formation estimates from 260M years, to 10M, to 2M, to it "depends"). Likewise, examples are growing of rapid formations with typical chemical make-up (see bottle, left) of classic stalactites and stalagmites including:- in Nat'l Geo the Carlsbad Caverns stalagmite that rapidly covered a bat - the tunnel stalagmites at Tennessee's Raccoon Mountain - hundreds of stalactites beneath the Lincoln Memorial - those near Gladfelter Hall at Philadelphia's Temple University (send photos to Bob@rsr.org) - hundreds of stalactites at Australia's zinc mine at Mt. Isa.   - and those beneath Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance. * Most Human Mutations Arose in 200 Generations: From Adam until Real Science Radio, in only 200 generations! The journal Nature reports The Recent Origin of Most Human Protein-coding Variants. As summarized by geneticist co-author Joshua Akey, "Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so" (the same number previously published by biblical creationists). Another 2012 paper, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Eugenie Scott's own field) on High mitochondrial mutation rates, shows that one mitochondrial DNA mutation occurs every other generation, which, as creationists point out, indicates that mtEve would have lived about 200 generations ago. That's not so old! * National Geographic's Not-So-Old Hard-Rock Canyon at Mount St. Helens: As our List of Not So Old Things (this web page) reveals, by a kneejerk reaction evolutionary scientists assign ages of tens or hundreds of thousands of years (or at least just long enough to contradict Moses' chronology in Genesis.) However, with closer study, routinely, more and more old ages get revised downward to fit the world's growing scientific knowledge. So the trend is not that more information lengthens ages, but rather, as data replaces guesswork, ages tend to shrink until they are consistent with the young-earth biblical timeframe. Consistent with this observation, the May 2000 issue of National Geographic quotes the U.S. Forest Service's scientist at Mount St. Helens, Peter Frenzen, describing the canyon on the north side of the volcano. "You'd expect a hard-rock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old. But this was cut in less than a decade." And as for the volcano itself, while again, the kneejerk reaction of old-earthers would be to claim that most geologic features are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, the atheistic National Geographic magazine acknowledges from the evidence that Mount St. Helens, the volcanic mount, is only about 4,000 years old! See below and more at rsr.org/mount-st-helens. * Mount St. Helens Dome Ten Years Old not 1.7 Million: Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Mass., using potassium-argon and other radiometric techniques claims the rock sample they dated, from the volcano's dome, solidified somewhere between 340,000 and 2.8 million years ago. However photographic evidence and historical reports document the dome's formation during the 1980s, just ten years prior to the samples being collected. With the age of this rock known, radiometric dating therefore gets the age 99.99999% wrong. * Devils Hole Pupfish Isolated Not for 13,000 Years But for 100: Secular scientists default to knee-jerk, older-than-Bible-age dates. However, a tiny Mojave desert fish is having none of it. Rather than having been genetically isolated from other fish for 13,000 years (which would make this small school of fish older than the Earth itself), according to a paper in the journal Nature, actual measurements of mutation rates indicate that the genetic diversity of these Pupfish could have been generated in about 100 years, give or take a few. * Polystrates like Spines and Rare Schools of Fossilized Jellyfish: Previously, seven sedimentary layers in Wisconsin had been described as taking a million years to form. And because jellyfish have no skeleton, as Charles Darwin pointed out, it is rare to find them among fossils. But now, reported in the journal Geology, a school of jellyfish fossils have been found throughout those same seven layers. So, polystrate fossils that condense the time of strata deposition from eons to hours or months, include: - Jellyfish in central Wisconsin were not deposited and fossilized over a million years but during a single event quick enough to trap a whole school. (This fossil school, therefore, taken as a unit forms a polystrate fossil.) Examples are everywhere that falsify the claims of strata deposition over millions of years. - Countless trilobites buried in astounding three dimensionality around the world are meticulously recovered from limestone, much of which is claimed to have been deposited very slowly. Contrariwise, because these specimens were buried rapidly in quickly laid down sediments, they show no evidence of greater erosion on their upper parts as compared to their lower parts.- The delicacy of radiating spine polystrates, like tadpole and jellyfish fossils, especially clearly demonstrate the rapidity of such strata deposition. - A second school of jellyfish, even though they rarely fossilized, exists in another locale with jellyfish fossils in multiple layers, in Australia's Brockman Iron Formation, constraining there too the rate of strata deposition. By the way, jellyfish are an example of evolution's big squeeze. Like galaxies evolving too quickly, galaxy clusters, and even human feet (which, like Mummy DNA, challenge the Out of Africa paradigm), jellyfish have gotten into the act squeezing evolution's timeline, here by 200 million years when they were found in strata allegedly a half-a-billion years old. Other examples, ironically referred to as Medusoid Problematica, are even found in pre-Cambrian strata. - 171 tadpoles of the same species buried in diatoms. - Leaves buried vertically through single-celled diatoms powerfully refute the claimed super-slow deposition of diatomaceous rock. - Many fossils, including a Mesosaur, have been buried in multiple "varve" layers, which are claimed to be annual depositions, yet they show no erosional patterns that would indicate gradual burial (as they claim, absurdly, over even thousands of years). - A single whale skeleton preserved in California in dozens of layers of diatom deposits thus forming a polystrate fossil. - 40 whales buried in the desert in Chile. "What's really interesting is that this didn't just happen once," said Smithsonian evolutionist Dr. Nick Pyenson. It happened four times." Why's that? Because "the fossil site has at least four layers", to which Real Science Radio's Bob Enyart replies: "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha", with RSR co-host Fred Williams thoughtfully adding, "Ha ha!" * Polystrate Trees: Examples abound around the world of polystrate trees:  - Yellowstone's petrified polystrate forest (with the NPS exhibit sign removed; see below) with successive layers of rootless trees demonstrating the rapid deposition of fifty layers of strata. - A similarly formed polystrate fossil forest in France demonstrating the rapid deposition of a dozen strata. - In a thousand locations including famously the Fossil Cliffs of Joggins, Nova Scotia, polystrate fossils such as trees span many strata. - These trees lack erosion: Not only should such fossils, generally speaking, not even exist, but polystrates including trees typically show no evidence of erosion increasing with height. All of this powerfully disproves the claim that the layers were deposited slowly over thousands or millions of years. In the experience of your RSR radio hosts, evolutionists commonly respond to this hard evidence with mocking. See CRSQ June 2006, ICR Impact #316, and RSR 8-11-06 at KGOV.com. * Yellowstone Petrified Trees Sign Removed: The National Park Service removed their incorrect sign (see left and more). The NPS had claimed that in dozens of different strata over a 40-square mile area, many petrified trees were still standing where they had grown. The NPS eventually removed the sign partly because those petrified trees had no root systems, which they would have had if they had grown there. Instead, the trees of this "fossil forest" have roots that are abruptly broken off two or three feet from their trunks. If these mature trees actually had been remnants of sequential forests that had grown up in strata layer on top of strata layer, 27 times on Specimen Ridge (and 50 times at Specimen Creek), such a natural history implies passage of more time than permitted by biblical chronology. So, don't trust the National Park Service on historical science because they're wrong on the age of the Earth. * Wood Petrifies Quickly: Not surprisingly, by the common evolutionary knee-jerk claim of deep time, "several researchers believe that several millions of years are necessary for the complete formation of silicified wood". Our List of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things includes the work of five Japanese scientists who proved creationist research and published their results in the peer-reviewed journal Sedimentary Geology showing that wood can and does petrify rapidly. Modern wood significantly petrified in 36 years these researchers concluded that wood buried in strata could have been petrified in "a fairly short period of time, in the order of several tens to hundreds of years." * The Scablands: The primary surface features of the Scablands, which cover thousands of square miles of eastern Washington, were long believed to have formed gradually. Yet, against the determined claims of uniformitarian geologists, there is now overwhelming evidence as presented even in a NOVA TV program that the primary features of the Scablands formed rapidly from a catastrophic breach of Lake Missoula causing a massive regional flood. Of course evolutionary geologists still argue that the landscape was formed over tens of thousands of years, now by claiming there must have been a hundred Missoula floods. However, the evidence that there was Only One Lake Missoula Flood has been powerfully reinforced by a University of Colorado Ph.D. thesis. So the Scablands itself is no longer available to old-earthers as de facto evidence for the passage of millions of years. * The Heart Mountain Detachment: in Wyoming just east of Yellowstone, this mountain did not break apart slowly by uniformitarian processes but in only about half-an-hour as widely reported including in the evolutionist LiveScience.com, "Land Speed Record: Mountain Moves 62 Miles in 30 Minutes." The evidence indicates that this mountain of rock covering 425 square miles rapidly broke into 50 pieces and slid apart over an area of more than 1,300 square miles in a biblical, not a "geological," timeframe.  * "150 Million" year-old Squid Ink Not Decomposed: This still-writable ink had dehydrated but had not decomposed! The British Geological Survey's Dr. Phil Wilby, who excavated the fossil, said, "It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilised in three dimensions, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old." And the Daily Mail states that, "the black ink was of exactly the same structure as that of today's version", just desiccated. And Wilby added, "Normally you would find only the hard parts like the shell and bones fossilised but... these creatures... can be dissected as if they are living animals, you can see the muscle fibres and cells. It is difficult to imagine... The structure is similar to ink from a modern squid so we can write with it..." Why is this difficult for evolutionists to imagine? Because as Dr. Carl Wieland writes, "Chemical structures 'fall apart' all by themselves over time due to the randomizing effects of molecular motion." Decades ago Bob Enyart broadcast a geology program about Mount St. Helens' catastrophic destruction of forests and the hydraulic transportation and upright deposition of trees. Later, Bob met the chief ranger from Haleakala National Park on Hawaii's island of Maui, Mark Tanaka-Sanders. The ranger agreed to correspond with his colleague at Yellowstone to urge him to have the sign removed. Thankfully, it was then removed. (See also AIG, CMI, and all the original Yellowstone exhibit photos.) Groundbreaking research conducted by creation geologist Dr. Steve Austin in Spirit Lake after Mount St. Helens eruption provided a modern-day analog to the formation of Yellowstone fossil forest. A steam blast from that volcano blew over tens of thousands of trees leaving them without attached roots. Many thousands of those trees were floating upright in Spirit Lake, and began sinking at varying rates into rapidly and sporadically deposited sediments. Once Yellowstone's successive forest interpretation was falsified (though like with junk DNA, it's too big to fail, so many atheists and others still cling to it), the erroneous sign was removed. * Asiatic vs. European Honeybees: These two populations of bees have been separated supposedly for seven million years. A researcher decided to put the two together to see what would happen. What we should have here is a failure to communicate that would have resulted after their "language" evolved over millions of years. However, European and Asiatic honeybees are still able to communicate, putting into doubt the evolutionary claim that they were separated over "geologic periods." For more, see the Public Library of Science, Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees. (Oh yeah, and why don't fossils of poorly-formed honeycombs exist, from the millions of years before the bees and natural selection finally got the design right? Ha! Because they don't exist! :) Nautiloid proves rapid limestone formation. * Remember the Nautiloids: In the Grand Canyon there is a limestone layer averaging seven feet thick that runs the 277 miles of the canyon (and beyond) that covers hundreds of square miles and contains an average of one nautiloid fossil per square meter. Along with many other dead creatures in this one particular layer, 15% of these nautiloids were killed and then fossilized standing on their heads. Yes, vertically. They were caught in such an intense and rapid catastrophic flow that gravity was not able to cause all of their dead carcasses to fall over on their sides. Famed Mount St. Helens geologist Steve Austin is also the world's leading expert on nautiloid fossils and has worked in the canyon and presented his findings to the park's rangers at the invitation of National Park Service officials. Austin points out, as is true of many of the world's mass fossil graveyards, that this enormous nautiloid deposition provides indisputable proof of the extremely rapid formation of a significant layer of limestone near the bottom of the canyon, a layer like the others we've been told about, that allegedly formed at the bottom of a calm and placid sea with slow and gradual sedimentation. But a million nautiloids, standing on their heads, literally, would beg to differ. At our sister stie, RSR provides the relevant Geologic Society of America abstract, links, and video. *  Now It's Allegedly Two Million Year-Old Leaves: "When we started pulling leaves out of the soil, that was surreal, to know that it's millions of years old..." sur-re-al: adjective: a bizarre mix of fact and fantasy. In this case, the leaves are the facts. Earth scientists from Ohio State and the University of Minnesota say that wood and leaves they found in the Canadian Arctic are at least two million years old, and perhaps more than ten million years old, even though the leaves are just dry and crumbly and the wood still burns! * Gold Precipitates in Veins in Less than a Second: After geologists submitted for decades to the assumption that each layer of gold would deposit at the alleged super slow rates of geologic process, the journal Nature Geoscience reports that each layer of deposition can occur within a few tenths of a second. Meanwhile, at the Lihir gold deposit in Papua New Guinea, evolutionists assumed the more than 20 million ounces of gold in the Lihir reserve took millions of years to deposit, but as reported in the journal Science, geologists can now demonstrate that the deposit could have formed in thousands of years, or far more quickly! Iceland's not-so-old Surtsey Island looks ancient. * Surtsey Island, Iceland: Of the volcanic island that formed in 1963, New Scientist reported in 2007 about Surtsey that "geographers... marvel that canyons, gullies and other land features that typically take tens of thousands or millions of years to form were created in less than a decade." Yes. And Sigurdur Thorarinsson, Iceland's chief  geologist, wrote in the months after Surtsey formed, "that the time scale," he had been trained "to attach to geological developments is misleading." [For what is said to] take thousands of years... the same development may take a few weeks or even days here [including to form] a landscape... so varied and mature that it was almost beyond belief... wide sandy beaches and precipitous crags... gravel banks and lagoons, impressive cliffs… hollows, glens and soft undulating land... fractures and faultscarps, channels and screes… confounded by what met your eye... boulders worn by the surf, some of which were almost round... -Iceland's chief geologist * The Palouse River Gorge: In the southeast of Washington State, the Palouse River Gorge is one of many features formed rapidly by 500 cubic miles of water catastrophically released with the breaching of a natural dam in the Lake Missoula Flood (which gouged out the Scablands as described above). So, hard rock can be breached and eroded rapidly. * Leaf Shapes Identical for 190 Million Years?  From Berkley.edu, "Ginkgo biloba... dates back to... about 190 million years ago... fossilized leaf material from the Tertiary species Ginkgo adiantoides is considered similar or even identical to that produced by modern Ginkgo biloba trees... virtually indistinguishable..." The literature describes leaf shapes as "spectacularly diverse" sometimes within a species but especially across the plant kingdom. Because all kinds of plants survive with all kinds of different leaf shapes, the conservation of a species retaining a single shape over alleged deep time is a telling issue. Darwin's theory is undermined by the unchanging shape over millions of years of a species' leaf shape. This lack of change, stasis in what should be an easily morphable plant trait, supports the broader conclusion that chimp-like creatures did not become human beings and all the other ambitious evolutionary creation of new kinds are simply imagined. (Ginkgo adiantoides and biloba are actually the same species. Wikipedia states, "It is doubtful whether the Northern Hemisphere fossil species of Ginkgo can be reliably distinguished." For oftentimes, as documented by Dr. Carl Werner in his Evolution: The Grand Experiment series, paleontogists falsely speciate identical specimens, giving different species names, even different genus names, to the fossil and living animals that appear identical.) * Box Canyon, Idaho: Geologists now think Box Canyon in Idaho, USA, was carved by a catastrophic flood and not slowly over millions of years with 1) huge plunge pools formed by waterfalls; 2) the almost complete removal of large basalt boulders from the canyon; 3) an eroded notch on the plateau at the top of the canyon; and 4) water scour marks on the basalt plateau leading to the canyon. Scientists calculate that the flood was so large that it could have eroded the whole canyon in as little as 35 days. See the journal Science, Formation of Box Canyon, Idaho, by Megaflood, and the Journal of Creation, and Creation Magazine. * Manganese Nodules Rapid Formation: Allegedly, as claimed at the Wikipedia entry from 2005 through 2021: "Nodule growth is one of the slowest of all geological phenomena – in the order of a centimeter over several million years." Wow, that would be slow! And a Texas A&M Marine Sciences technical slide presentation says, “They grow very slowly (mm/million years) and can be tens of millions of years old.” But according to a World Almanac documentary they have formed "around beer cans," said marine geologist Dr. John Yates in the 1997 video Universe Beneath the Sea: The Next Frontier. There are also reports of manganese nodules forming around ships sunk in the First World War. See more at at youngearth.com, at TOL, in the print edition of the Journal of Creation, and in this typical forum discussion with atheists (at the Chicago Cubs forum no less :). * "6,000 year-old" Mitochondrial Eve: As the Bible calls "Eve... the mother of all living" (Gen. 3:20), genetic researchers have named the one woman from whom all humans have descended "Mitochondrial Eve." But in a scientific attempt to date her existence, they openly admit that they included chimpanzee DNA in their analysis in order to get what they viewed as a reasonably old date of 200,000 years ago (which is still surprisingly recent from their perspective, but old enough not to strain Darwinian theory too much). But then as widely reported including by Science magazine, when they dropped the chimp data and used only actual human mutation rates, that process determined that Eve lived only six thousand years ago! In Ann Gibbon's Science article, "Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," rather than again using circular reasoning by assuming their conclusion (that humans evolved from ape-like creatures), they performed their calculations using actual measured mutation rates. This peer-reviewed journal then reported that if these rates have been constant, "mitochondrial Eve… would be a mere 6000 years old." See also the journal Nature and creation.com's "A shrinking date for Eve," and Walt Brown's assessment. Expectedly though, evolutionists have found a way to reject their own unbiased finding (the conclusion contrary to their self-interest) by returning to their original method of using circular reasoning, as reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics, "calibrating against recent evidence for the divergence time of humans and chimpanzees,"  to reset their mitochondrial clock back to 200,000 years. * Even Younger Y-Chromosomal Adam: (Although he should be called, "Y-Chromosomal Noah.") While we inherit our mtDNA only from our mothers, only men have a Y chromosome (which incidentally genetically disproves the cla

  [While Bob & Cheryl Enyart go fishing we invite you to enjoy from the RSR archives our favorite List of Not So Old Things! Photos from today, June 25, 2021.] -- Finches Diversify in Decades, Opals Form in Months,  Man's Genetic Diversity in 200 Generations, C-14 Everywhere: Real Science Radio hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams present their classic program that led to the audience-favorites rsr.org/list-shows! See below and hear on today's radio program our list of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things! From opals forming in months to man's genetic diversity in 200 generations, and with carbon 14 everywhere it's not supposed to be (including in diamonds and dinosaur bones!), scientific observations fill the guys' most traditional list challenging those who claim that the earth is billions of years old. Many of these scientific finds demand a re-evaluation of supposed million and billion-year ages. * Finches Adapt in 17 Years, Not 2.3 Million: Charles Darwin's finches are claimed to have taken 2,300,000 years to diversify from an initial species blown onto the Galapagos Islands. Yet individuals from a single finch species on a U.S. Bird Reservation in the Pacific were introduced to a group of small islands 300 miles away and in at most 17 years, like Darwin's finches, they had diversified their beaks, related muscles, and behavior to fill various ecological niches. Hear about this also at rsr.org/spetner. * Opals Can Form in "A Few Months" And Don't Need 100,000 Years: A leading authority on opals, Allan W. Eckert, observed that, "scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands... Not true." A 2011 peer-reviewed paper in a geology journal from Australia, where almost all the world's opal is found, reported on the: "new timetable for opal formation involving weeks to a few months and not the hundreds of thousands of years envisaged by the conventional weathering model." (And apparently, per a 2019 report from Entomology Today, opals can even form around insects!) More knowledgeable scientists resist the uncritical, group-think insistence on false super-slow formation rates (as also for manganese nodules, gold veins, stone, petroleum, canyons and gullies, and even guts, all below). Regarding opals, Darwinian bias led geologists to long ignore possible quick action, as from microbes, as a possible explanation for these mineraloids. For both in nature and in the lab, opals form rapidly, not even in 10,000 years, but in weeks. See this also from creationists by a geologist, a paleobiochemist, and a nuclear chemist. * Finches Speciate in Two Generations vs Two Million Years for Darwin's Birds?  Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands are said to have diversified into 14 species over a period of two million years. But in 2017 the journal Science reported a newcomer to the Island which within two generations spawned a reproductively isolated new species. In another instance as documented by Lee Spetner, a hundred birds of the same finch species introduced to an island cluster a 1,000 kilometers from Galapagos diversified into species with the typical variations in beak sizes, etc. "If this diversification occurred in less than seventeen years," Dr. Spetner asks, "why did Darwin's Galapagos finches [as claimed by evolutionists] have to take two million years?" * Blue Eyes Originated Not So Long Ago: Not a million years ago, nor a hundred thousand years ago, but based on a peer-reviewed paper in Human Genetics, a press release at Science Daily reports that, "research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today." * Adding the Entire Universe to our List of Not So Old Things? Based on March 2019 findings from Hubble, Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and his co-authors in the Astrophysical Journal estimate that the universe is about a billion years younger than previously thought! Then in September 2019 in the journal Science, the age dropped precipitiously to as low as 11.4 billion years! Of course, these measurements also further squeeze the canonical story of the big bang chronology with its many already existing problems including the insufficient time to "evolve" distant mature galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, enormous black holes, filaments, bubbles, walls, and other superstructures. So, even though the latest estimates are still absurdly too old (Google: big bang predictions, and click on the #1 ranked article, or just go on over there to rsr.org/bb), regardless, we thought we'd plop the whole universe down on our List of Not So Old Things!   * After the Soft Tissue Discoveries, NOW Dino DNA: When a North Carolina State University paleontologist took the Tyrannosaurus Rex photos to the right of original biological material, that led to the 2016 discovery of dinosaur DNA, So far researchers have also recovered dinosaur blood vessels, collagen, osteocytes, hemoglobin, red blood cells, and various proteins. As of May 2018, twenty-six scientific journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, PLoS One, Bone, and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, have confirmed the discovery of biomaterial fossils from many dinosaurs! Organisms including T. Rex, hadrosaur, titanosaur, triceratops, Lufengosaur, mosasaur, and Archaeopteryx, and many others dated, allegedly, even hundreds of millions of years old, have yielded their endogenous, still-soft biological material. See the web's most complete listing of 100+ journal papers (screenshot, left) announcing these discoveries at bflist.rsr.org and see it in layman's terms at rsr.org/soft. * Rapid Stalactites, Stalagmites, Etc.: A construction worker in 1954 left a lemonade bottle in one of Australia's famous Jenolan Caves. By 2011 it had been naturally transformed into a stalagmite (below, right). Increasing scientific knowledge is arguing for rapid cave formation (see below, Nat'l Park Service shrinks Carlsbad Caverns formation estimates from 260M years, to 10M, to 2M, to it "depends"). Likewise, examples are growing of rapid formations with typical chemical make-up (see bottle, left) of classic stalactites and stalagmites including:- in Nat'l Geo the Carlsbad Caverns stalagmite that rapidly covered a bat - the tunnel stalagmites at Tennessee's Raccoon Mountain - hundreds of stalactites beneath the Lincoln Memorial - those near Gladfelter Hall at Philadelphia's Temple University (send photos to Bob@rsr.org) - hundreds of stalactites at Australia's zinc mine at Mt. Isa.   - and those beneath Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance. * Most Human Mutations Arose in 200 Generations: From Adam until Real Science Radio, in only 200 generations! The journal Nature reports The Recent Origin of Most Human Protein-coding Variants. As summarized by geneticist co-author Joshua Akey, "Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so" (the same number previously published by biblical creationists). Another 2012 paper, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Eugenie Scott's own field) on High mitochondrial mutation rates, shows that one mitochondrial DNA mutation occurs every other generation, which, as creationists point out, indicates that mtEve would have lived about 200 generations ago. That's not so old! * National Geographic's Not-So-Old Hard-Rock Canyon at Mount St. Helens: As our List of Not So Old Things (this web page) reveals, by a kneejerk reaction evolutionary scientists assign ages of tens or hundreds of thousands of years (or at least just long enough to contradict Moses' chronology in Genesis.) However, with closer study, routinely, more and more old ages get revised downward to fit the world's growing scientific knowledge. So the trend is not that more information lengthens ages, but rather, as data replaces guesswork, ages tend to shrink until they are consistent with the young-earth biblical timeframe. Consistent with this observation, the May 2000 issue of National Geographic quotes the U.S. Forest Service's scientist at Mount St. Helens, Peter Frenzen, describing the canyon on the north side of the volcano. "You'd expect a hard-rock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old. But this was cut in less than a decade." And as for the volcano itself, while again, the kneejerk reaction of old-earthers would be to claim that most geologic features are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, the atheistic National Geographic magazine acknowledges from the evidence that Mount St. Helens, the volcanic mount, is only about 4,000 years old! See below and more at rsr.org/mount-st-helens. * Mount St. Helens Dome Ten Years Old not 1.7 Million: Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Mass., using potassium-argon and other radiometric techniques claims the rock sample they dated, from the volcano's dome, solidified somewhere between 340,000 and 2.8 million years ago. However photographic evidence and historical reports document the dome's formation during the 1980s, just ten years prior to the samples being collected. With the age of this rock known, radiometric dating therefore gets the age 99.99999% wrong. * Devils Hole Pupfish Isolated Not for 13,000 Years But for 100: Secular scientists default to knee-jerk, older-than-Bible-age dates. However, a tiny Mojave desert fish is having none of it. Rather than having been genetically isolated from other fish for 13,000 years (which would make this small school of fish older than the Earth itself), according to a paper in the journal Nature, actual measurements of mutation rates indicate that the genetic diversity of these Pupfish could have been generated in about 100 years, give or take a few. * Polystrates like Spines and Rare Schools of Fossilized Jellyfish: Previously, seven sedimentary layers in Wisconsin had been described as taking a million years to form. And because jellyfish have no skeleton, as Charles Darwin pointed out, it is rare to find them among fossils. But now, reported in the journal Geology, a school of jellyfish fossils have been found throughout those same seven layers. So, polystrate fossils that condense the time of strata deposition from eons to hours or months, include: - Jellyfish in central Wisconsin were not deposited and fossilized over a million years but during a single event quick enough to trap a whole school. (This fossil school, therefore, taken as a unit forms a polystrate fossil.) Examples are everywhere that falsify the claims of strata deposition over millions of years. - Countless trilobites buried in astounding three dimensionality around the world are meticulously recovered from limestone, much of which is claimed to have been deposited very slowly. Contrariwise, because these specimens were buried rapidly in quickly laid down sediments, they show no evidence of greater erosion on their upper parts as compared to their lower parts.- The delicacy of radiating spine polystrates, like tadpole and jellyfish fossils, especially clearly demonstrate the rapidity of such strata deposition. - A second school of jellyfish, even though they rarely fossilized, exists in another locale with jellyfish fossils in multiple layers, in Australia's Brockman Iron Formation, constraining there too the rate of strata deposition. By the way, jellyfish are an example of evolution's big squeeze. Like galaxies evolving too quickly, galaxy clusters, and even human feet (which, like Mummy DNA, challenge the Out of Africa paradigm), jellyfish have gotten into the act squeezing evolution's timeline, here by 200 million years when they were found in strata allegedly a half-a-billion years old. Other examples, ironically referred to as Medusoid Problematica, are even found in pre-Cambrian strata. - 171 tadpoles of the same species buried in diatoms. - Leaves buried vertically through single-celled diatoms powerfully refute the claimed super-slow deposition of diatomaceous rock. - Many fossils, including a Mesosaur, have been buried in multiple "varve" layers, which are claimed to be annual depositions, yet they show no erosional patterns that would indicate gradual burial (as they claim, absurdly, over even thousands of years). - A single whale skeleton preserved in California in dozens of layers of diatom deposits thus forming a polystrate fossil. - 40 whales buried in the desert in Chile. "What's really interesting is that this didn't just happen once," said Smithsonian evolutionist Dr. Nick Pyenson. It happened four times." Why's that? Because "the fossil site has at least four layers", to which Real Science Radio's Bob Enyart replies: "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha", with RSR co-host Fred Williams thoughtfully adding, "Ha ha!" * Polystrate Trees: Examples abound around the world of polystrate trees:  - Yellowstone's petrified polystrate forest (with the NPS exhibit sign removed; see below) with successive layers of rootless trees demonstrating the rapid deposition of fifty layers of strata. - A similarly formed polystrate fossil forest in France demonstrating the rapid deposition of a dozen strata. - In a thousand locations including famously the Fossil Cliffs of Joggins, Nova Scotia, polystrate fossils such as trees span many strata. - These trees lack erosion: Not only should such fossils, generally speaking, not even exist, but polystrates including trees typically show no evidence of erosion increasing with height. All of this powerfully disproves the claim that the layers were deposited slowly over thousands or millions of years. In the experience of your RSR radio hosts, evolutionists commonly respond to this hard evidence with mocking. See CRSQ June 2006, ICR Impact #316, and RSR 8-11-06 at KGOV.com. * Yellowstone Petrified Trees Sign Removed: The National Park Service removed their incorrect sign (see left and more). The NPS had claimed that in dozens of different strata over a 40-square mile area, many petrified trees were still standing where they had grown. The NPS eventually removed the sign partly because those petrified trees had no root systems, which they would have had if they had grown there. Instead, the trees of this "fossil forest" have roots that are abruptly broken off two or three feet from their trunks. If these mature trees actually had been remnants of sequential forests that had grown up in strata layer on top of strata layer, 27 times on Specimen Ridge (and 50 times at Specimen Creek), such a natural history implies passage of more time than permitted by biblical chronology. So, don't trust the National Park Service on historical science because they're wrong on the age of the Earth. * Wood Petrifies Quickly: Not surprisingly, by the common evolutionary knee-jerk claim of deep time, "several researchers believe that several millions of years are necessary for the complete formation of silicified wood". Our List of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things includes the work of five Japanese scientists who proved creationist research and published their results in the peer-reviewed journal Sedimentary Geology showing that wood can and does petrify rapidly. Modern wood significantly petrified in 36 years these researchers concluded that wood buried in strata could have been petrified in "a fairly short period of time, in the order of several tens to hundreds of years." * The Scablands: The primary surface features of the Scablands, which cover thousands of square miles of eastern Washington, were long believed to have formed gradually. Yet, against the determined claims of uniformitarian geologists, there is now overwhelming evidence as presented even in a NOVA TV program that the primary features of the Scablands formed rapidly from a catastrophic breach of Lake Missoula causing a massive regional flood. Of course evolutionary geologists still argue that the landscape was formed over tens of thousands of years, now by claiming there must have been a hundred Missoula floods. However, the evidence that there was Only One Lake Missoula Flood has been powerfully reinforced by a University of Colorado Ph.D. thesis. So the Scablands itself is no longer available to old-earthers as de facto evidence for the passage of millions of years. * The Heart Mountain Detachment: in Wyoming just east of Yellowstone, this mountain did not break apart slowly by uniformitarian processes but in only about half-an-hour as widely reported including in the evolutionist LiveScience.com, "Land Speed Record: Mountain Moves 62 Miles in 30 Minutes." The evidence indicates that this mountain of rock covering 425 square miles rapidly broke into 50 pieces and slid apart over an area of more than 1,300 square miles in a biblical, not a "geological," timeframe.  * "150 Million" year-old Squid Ink Not Decomposed: This still-writable ink had dehydrated but had not decomposed! The British Geological Survey's Dr. Phil Wilby, who excavated the fossil, said, "It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilised in three dimensions, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old." And the Daily Mail states that, "the black ink was of exactly the same structure as that of today's version", just desiccated. And Wilby added, "Normally you would find only the hard parts like the shell and bones fossilised but... these creatures... can be dissected as if they are living animals, you can see the muscle fibres and cells. It is difficult to imagine... The structure is similar to ink from a modern squid so we can write with it..." Why is this difficult for evolutionists to imagine? Because as Dr. Carl Wieland writes, "Chemical structures 'fall apart' all by themselves over time due to the randomizing effects of molecular motion." Decades ago Bob Enyart broadcast a geology program about Mount St. Helens' catastrophic destruction of forests and the hydraulic transportation and upright deposition of trees. Later, Bob met the chief ranger from Haleakala National Park on Hawaii's island of Maui, Mark Tanaka-Sanders. The ranger agreed to correspond with his colleague at Yellowstone to urge him to have the sign removed. Thankfully, it was then removed. (See also AIG, CMI, and all the original Yellowstone exhibit photos.) Groundbreaking research conducted by creation geologist Dr. Steve Austin in Spirit Lake after Mount St. Helens eruption provided a modern-day analog to the formation of Yellowstone fossil forest. A steam blast from that volcano blew over tens of thousands of trees leaving them without attached roots. Many thousands of those trees were floating upright in Spirit Lake, and began sinking at varying rates into rapidly and sporadically deposited sediments. Once Yellowstone's successive forest interpretation was falsified (though like with junk DNA, it's too big to fail, so many atheists and others still cling to it), the erroneous sign was removed. * Asiatic vs. European Honeybees: These two populations of bees have been separated supposedly for seven million years. A researcher decided to put the two together to see what would happen. What we should have here is a failure to communicate that would have resulted after their "language" evolved over millions of years. However, European and Asiatic honeybees are still able to communicate, putting into doubt the evolutionary claim that they were separated over "geologic periods." For more, see the Public Library of Science, Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees. (Oh yeah, and why don't fossils of poorly-formed honeycombs exist, from the millions of years before the bees and natural selection finally got the design right? Ha! Because they don't exist! :) Nautiloid proves rapid limestone formation.* Remember the Nautiloids: In the Grand Canyon there is a limestone layer averaging seven feet thick that runs the 277 miles of the canyon (and beyond) that covers hundreds of square miles and contains an average of one nautiloid fossil per square meter. Along with many other dead creatures in this one particular layer, 15% of these nautiloids were killed and then fossilized standing on their heads. Yes, vertically. They were caught in such an intense and rapid catastrophic flow that gravity was not able to cause all of their dead carcasses to fall over on their sides. Famed Mount St. Helens geologist Steve Austin is also the world's leading expert on nautiloid fossils and has worked in the canyon and presented his findings to the park's rangers at the invitation of National Park Service officials. Austin points out, as is true of many of the world's mass fossil graveyards, that this enormous nautiloid deposition provides indisputable proof of the extremely rapid formation of a significant layer of limestone near the bottom of the canyon, a layer like the others we've been told about, that allegedly formed at the bottom of a calm and placid sea with slow and gradual sedimentation. But a million nautiloids, standing on their heads, literally, would beg to differ. At our sister stie, RSR provides the relevant Geologic Society of America abstract, links, and video. *  Now It's Allegedly Two Million Year-Old Leaves: "When we started pulling leaves out of the soil, that was surreal, to know that it's millions of years old..." sur-re-al: adjective: a bizarre mix of fact and fantasy. In this case, the leaves are the facts. Earth scientists from Ohio State and the University of Minnesota say that wood and leaves they found in the Canadian Arctic are at least two million years old, and perhaps more than ten million years old, even though the leaves are just dry and crumbly and the wood still burns! * Gold Precipitates in Veins in Less than a Second: After geologists submitted for decades to the assumption that each layer of gold would deposit at the alleged super slow rates of geologic process, the journal Nature Geoscience reports that each layer of deposition can occur within a few tenths of a second. Meanwhile, at the Lihir gold deposit in Papua New Guinea, evolutionists assumed the more than 20 million ounces of gold in the Lihir reserve took millions of years to deposit, but as reported in the journal Science, geologists can now demonstrate that the deposit could have formed in thousands of years, or far more quickly! Iceland's not-so-old Surtsey Island looks ancient.* Surtsey Island, Iceland: Of the volcanic island that formed in 1963, New Scientist reported in 2007 about Surtsey that "geographers... marvel that canyons, gullies and other land features that typically take tens of thousands or millions of years to form were created in less than a decade." Yes. And Sigurdur Thorarinsson, Iceland's chief  geologist, wrote in the months after Surtsey formed, "that the time scale," he had been trained "to attach to geological developments is misleading." [For what is said to] take thousands of years... the same development may take a few weeks or even days here [including to form] a landscape... so varied and mature that it was almost beyond belief... wide sandy beaches and precipitous crags... gravel banks and lagoons, impressive cliffs… hollows, glens and soft undulating land... fractures and faultscarps, channels and screes… confounded by what met your eye... boulders worn by the surf, some of which were almost round... -Iceland's chief geologist * The Palouse River Gorge: In the southeast of Washington State, the Palouse River Gorge is one of many features formed rapidly by 500 cubic miles of water catastrophically released with the breaching of a natural dam in the Lake Missoula Flood (which gouged out the Scablands as described above). So, hard rock can be breached and eroded rapidly. * Leaf Shapes Identical for 190 Million Years?  From Berkley.edu, "Ginkgo biloba... dates back to... about 190 million years ago... fossilized leaf material from the Tertiary species Ginkgo adiantoides is considered similar or even identical to that produced by modern Ginkgo biloba trees... virtually indistinguishable..." The literature describes leaf shapes as "spectacularly diverse" sometimes within a species but especially across the plant kingdom. Because all kinds of plants survive with all kinds of different leaf shapes, the conservation of a species retaining a single shape over alleged deep time is a telling issue. Darwin's theory is undermined by the unchanging shape over millions of years of a species' leaf shape. This lack of change, stasis in what should be an easily morphable plant trait, supports the broader conclusion that chimp-like creatures did not become human beings and all the other ambitious evolutionary creation of new kinds are simply imagined. (Ginkgo adiantoides and biloba are actually the same species. Wikipedia states, "It is doubtful whether the Northern Hemisphere fossil species of Ginkgo can be reliably distinguished." For oftentimes, as documented by Dr. Carl Werner in his Evolution: The Grand Experiment series, paleontogists falsely speciate identical specimens, giving different species names, even different genus names, to the fossil and living animals that appear identical.) * Box Canyon, Idaho: Geologists now think Box Canyon in Idaho, USA, was carved by a catastrophic flood and not slowly over millions of years with 1) huge plunge pools formed by waterfalls; 2) the almost complete removal of large basalt boulders from the canyon; 3) an eroded notch on the plateau at the top of the canyon; and 4) water scour marks on the basalt plateau leading to the canyon. Scientists calculate that the flood was so large that it could have eroded the whole canyon in as little as 35 days. See the journal Science, Formation of Box Canyon, Idaho, by Megaflood, and the Journal of Creation, and Creation Magazine. * Manganese Nodules Rapid Formation: Allegedly, as claimed at the Wikipedia entry from 2005 through 2021: "Nodule growth is one of the slowest of all geological phenomena – in the order of a centimeter over several million years." Wow, that would be slow! And a Texas A&M Marine Sciences technical slide presentation says, “They grow very slowly (mm/million years) and can be tens of millions of years old.” But according to a World Almanac documentary they have formed "around beer cans," said marine geologist Dr. John Yates in the 1997 video Universe Beneath the Sea: The Next Frontier. There are also reports of manganese nodules forming around ships sunk in the First World War. See more at at youngearth.com, at TOL, in the print edition of the Journal of Creation, and in this typical forum discussion with atheists (at the Chicago Cubs forum no less :). * "6,000 year-old" Mitochondrial Eve: As the Bible calls "Eve... the mother of all living" (Gen. 3:20), genetic researchers have named the one woman from whom all humans have descended "Mitochondrial Eve." But in a scientific attempt to date her existence, they openly admit that they included chimpanzee DNA in their analysis in order to get what they viewed as a reasonably old date of 200,000 years ago (which is still surprisingly recent from their perspective, but old enough not to strain Darwinian theory too much). But then as widely reported including by Science magazine, when they dropped the chimp data and used only actual human mutation rates, that process determined that Eve lived only six thousand years ago! In Ann Gibbon's Science article, "Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," rather than again using circular reasoning by assuming their conclusion (that humans evolved from ape-like creatures), they performed their calculations using actual measured mutation rates. This peer-reviewed journal then reported that if these rates have been constant, "mitochondrial Eve… would be a mere 6000 years old." See also the journal Nature and creation.com's "A shrinking date for Eve," and Walt Brown's assessment. Expectedly though, evolutionists have found a way to reject their own unbiased finding (the conclusion contrary to their self-interest) by returning to their original method of using circular reasoning, as reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics, "calibrating against recent evidence for the divergence time of humans and chimpanzees,"  to reset their mitochondrial clock back to 200,000 years. * Even Younger Y-Chromosomal Adam: (Although he should be called, "Y-Chromosomal Noah.") While we inherit our mtDNA only from our mothers, only men have a Y chromosome (which incidentally genetically disproves the claim that the fetus is "part of the woman's body," since the little boy's y chromosome could never be part of mom's body). Based on documented mutation rates on and the extraordinary lack o

Multi-volume work on science edited by Francis Rolt-Wheeler. The first volume is on Astronomy written by Waldemar Kaempffert. This book briefly discusses the evolution of astronomical beliefs and the development of instruments and progress of methods in the science. It explains, further, the different astronomical laws, theories, phenomena and objects, as well as the history of these discoveries. (summary by Sienna) Get Audible: https://amzn.to/3fZZT4p Crypto Opportunities: https://bit.ly/3bB2yAu Grow your Social Following: https://bit.ly/3wJi70U ManySwap: https://bit.ly/3yGUVSP --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/freeaudiobooks/support

Multi-volume work on science edited by Francis Rolt-Wheeler. The first volume is on Astronomy written by Waldemar Kaempffert. This book briefly discusses the evolution of astronomical beliefs and the development of instruments and progress of methods in the science. It explains, further, the different astronomical laws, theories, phenomena and objects, as well as the history of these discoveries. (summary by Sienna) Get Audible: https://amzn.to/3fZZT4p Crypto Opportunities: https://bit.ly/3bB2yAu Grow your Social Following: https://bit.ly/3wJi70U ManySwap: https://bit.ly/3yGUVSP --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/freeaudiobooks/support

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://whenthecurveslineup.com/2021/03/04/2021-march-13-mars-star-clusters/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jeffrey-l-hunt/support

More great books at LoyalBooks.com

Today we cover the large scale structures of the universe. Everything from Stars, Star Clusters, Galaxies, Galaxy Clusters, Filaments, Walls, Great Walls, Voids, Super Voids, Super Clusters, Dark Flow, The Great Attractor and questioning the expansion of our universe!

Today we cover the large scale structures of the universe. Everything from Stars, Star Clusters, Galaxies, Galaxy Clusters, Filaments, Walls, Great Walls, Voids, Super Voids, Super Clusters, Dark Flow, The Great Attractor and questioning the expansion of our universe!

Today we cover the large scale structures of the universe. Everything from Stars, Star Clusters, Galaxies, Galaxy Clusters, Filaments, Walls, Great Walls, Voids, Super Voids, Super Clusters, Dark Flow, The Great Attractor and questioning the expansion of our universe!

Why Astronomy? For many, the Milky Way acts as a source of natural inspiration. The nighttime sky, complete with its arcing brilliance of dense star clouds and deep blue, red, and yellow colored stars sit more removed from humanity than ever. How many times in the past year did you see it? Have you ever seen it? PodAstro is about more than just Astronomy, it's about inspiring YOU to take a second to put your life, your world, and your environment into perspective. There's only one Earth, and it's not very big, nothing we do on it means a lick in the grand scheme of things, but to the best of our knowledge, it's unique, and there's nothing else like it anywhere. We posed the question "Why Astronomy?" to a number of amateur astronomy enthusiasts. Their answers range from childhood curiosity, to the lunar landing, to simply inspiring awe in the public as a liaison of the night sky at public star parties. The common thread, though, revolved around a deep infatuation with a feeling of connection to the nighttime sky that surpasses words.We want to hear back from you. Why Astronomy? What draws you to the delve into your curiosity about the nighttime sky? Email us at PodAstro@dvaa.org!! Learn more about the Delaware Valley Amateur Astronomers. Support the show (http://dvaa.org/donations)

In this episode we talk about globular clusters and how they help us work out the age of stars, and then return to our neighbourhood to investigate the rumour of an undiscovered planet in the Solar System.

Episode 17 of Headspace the Podcast: Psyched for Space! In this episode, Amanda tells Jessica about syphilis, why it's important to psychology, and a super unethical study of syphilis led by the United States government. Jessica tells Amanda about star clusters, the different types of star clusters, and yet again blows Amanda's mind at the scale of the universe. 

Dawn pairing of Jupiter and Venus, Moon shines near star clusters, meteor activity all month long

Dawn pairing of Jupiter and Venus, Moon shines near star clusters, meteor activity all month long

Tune in to this week's 101 Dimensions to hear an eclectic mix of new and old electronic/ambient music! Here's what's on tap:1. Erik Norlander – City Of Living Machines (from the album Seas Of Orion, 2004)2. 17 Pygmies – Celestina XVI (from the album Celestina II – Second Son, 2011)3. Ian Boddy & David Wright – Still Motion (from the album Shifting Sands, 2009)4. David Bedford – The Song Of The White Horse (from the album Star Clusters, Nebulae & Places In Devon/The Song Of The White Horse, 1999)5. 17 Pygmies – Celestina XXVII (from the album CIII – Even Celestina Gets The Blues (A Tale Of Love And Quantum Physics, 2012)6. Rocket Scientists – Traveler On The Supernatural Highway (from the album Supernatural Highways, 2014)7. Tangerine Dream – Suite From Dead Solid Perfect (from the album Dream Music, 1992)8. Red Shift – Damage (from the album Last, 2007)Until next time...Prog On!TonyWebsite: Progwatch.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ProgWatch/Twitter: @ProgSquatchEmail: progsquatch@gmail.com

In Episode SH021 of Star Hopping… We’ll be presenting another Star Hopping “Extra”: we’ll discuss the different types of Star Clusters that you can find in your telescope, how they might appear in your eyepiece, and explain the differences between them. Intro So this episode is a Star Hopping Extra – a discussion we can have Read More ... The post SH021 – The Different Types of Star Clusters appeared first on Star Hopping.

SOFIA is more than a telescope tucked into a re-purposed commercial airliner. It's a complete flying astronomical observation platform which carries a dozen or Astrophotographer Rogelio Bernal Andreo's colorful wide field images of deep sky objects like galaxies, nebulae, star clusters has garnered him dozens of photography awards including the Royal Observatory of Greenwich's 2010 Best Astrophotographer of the Year.

Studies have suggested that there is a strong correlation between the masses of nuclear star clusters (NSCs) and their host galaxies, a correlation which is said to be an extension of the well-known correlations between supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host galaxies. But careful analysis of disk galaxies-including 2D bulge/disk/bar decompositions-shows that while SMBHs correlate with the stellar mass of the bulge component of galaxies, the masses of NSCs correlate much better with the total galaxy stellar mass. In addition, the mass ratio M-NSC/M-star,M- tot for NSCs in spirals (at least those with Hubble types Sc and later) is typically an order of magnitude smaller than the mass ratio M-BH/M-star,M- bul of SMBHs. The absence of a universal ``central massive object'' correlation argues against common formation and growth mechanisms for both SMBHs and NSCs. We also discuss evidence for a break in the NSC-host galaxy correlation, galaxies with Hubble types earlier than Sbc appear to host systematically more massive NSCs than do types Sc and later.

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 12:00:00 +0100 https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13529/ https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13529/1/Jalali_Behrang.pdf Jalali, Behrang ddc:530, ddc:500, Fakult

Transcript: The ages of stars are derived from stellar models. The physics is complex so computers are used to simulate energy transport mechanisms. The details depend on heavy element abundance and on the mechanism for helium diffusion in the atmosphere of the stars. Thus there are uncertainties attached to the prediction of luminosity from stellar models. There are also uncertainties attached to the determination of luminosity from observation of stars. This can include the effect of interstellar extinction and uncertainties in the distance estimates. Since luminosity is proportional to distance squared, a ten percent error in the distance leads to a twenty percent error in luminosity. For all of these reasons it’s difficult to measure ages more accurately than ten or twenty percent.

Wed, 8 Jun 2011 12:00:00 +0100 https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13164/ https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13164/1/Misgeld_Ingo.pdf Misgeld, Ingo ddc:530, ddc:500, Fa

A few minutes after the Big Bang that created our Universe, nucleosynthesis reactions forged some lighter isotopes, including 7Li. Ever since then, such reactions have taken place in the hot stellar interiors, providing the stars with the energy to shine and forming all chemical elements necessary for life as we know it. In this thesis I describe how we have inferred the chemical composition of stars in a globular cluster, hosting one of the oldest stellar populations in our Galaxy, in order to address two fundamental astrophysical problems. The first problem is related to lithium, and the prediction of its primordial abundance from present cosmological theories of how the Universe was born. The Li abundances that we measure in the envelopes of globular cluster stars are lower than this estimate and we investigate the possibility that Li has been drained from the stellar surfaces. This thesis presents observational evidence that low-mass stars experience a small increase in their surface Li abundances during the course of their late phases of evolution, supporting this hypothesis. The second question is related to the formation and evolution of globular clusters. It appears that these dense stellar environments early underwent a unique form of self- enrichment, by retaining the gas outflow from slow stellar winds. The material was then incorporated into a second stellar generation with identical chemical signatures to the first, except for a handful of lighter elements, including sodium. I here discuss several aspects of this stellar pollution process. Only with a correct physical description of the radiative and convective energy transport through the stellar atmosphere, and the equilibrium state of the atoms, ions and molecules that form the tenuous gas, can we make solid predictions of the emergent spectrum and derive accurate abundances. In particular, I discuss how the simplifying assumption of local thermal equilibrium give rise to systematic errors in the analysis of Li and Na spectral lines, commonly mis-estimating the elemental abundances in stars by 10–50%, and in certain cases considerably more. Moreover, we have for the first time investigated the combined influence from departures from local thermal equilibrium and hydro-static equilibrium in the determination of the solar Na abundance.

Stars do not form in isolation, they form in groups known as star clusters. Star clusters are seen in a wide range of galaxies and environments. Their presence reveals the history of the host galaxy and the processes of its star formation. During the last years star clusters have been deeply investigated in violent environments, while the properties of star clusters in more quiet environments have received less attention. Among all unperturbed environments we focus on 5 spiral galaxies with no signs of external perturbations: NGC 45, NGC 1313, NGC 4395, NGC 5236 and NGC 7793. Star clusters lying in these galaxies were observed through HST imaging and VLT spectroscopy. The analysis of star cluster masses, ages, sizes, and their positions on the galaxies, showed that star cluster formation is an ongoing process that depends on the local conditions. The observed star cluster luminosity functions show values consistent with the expected alpha~-2. We found an important number of globular clusters in NGC 45. Their properties are analyzed through photometry and spectroscopy. Photometry suggests that these globular clusters belong to a single metal poor population. Spectroscopy confirmed this for the 8 brightest ones. Velocities indicate halo or bulge kinematics. Absorption spectrum features indicate ages of the order of Gyr and [alpha/Fe] values lower than the Milky Way globular clusters, but similar to dwarf galaxies in the local group.