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For distant stars, astronomers estimate the distance by comparing the intensity

ID: 2008162 • Letter: F

Question

For distant stars, astronomers estimate the distance by comparing the intensity of light coming from these stars with the intensity of similar stars at a distance of 10 parsecs (1 parsec = 3.09 * 1016m). What is the intensity of the Sun at 10 parsecs? How far (in parsecs) from the Earth is a similar star, which has a magnitude number greater by 3 than the Sun observed from 10 parsecs? (A higher by one magnitude number star corresponds to a 2.5 times lower light intensity from the star. Stars with lower magnitude numbers are higher).

Explanation / Answer

Creationist cosmologies encompass a variety of theories of young Earth creationists that are designed to support the religious belief of a literal reading of Genesis and that the universe is only a few thousand years old. Creationist cosmologies are often concerned with solving the "starlight problem"; that light from galaxies which are billions of light-years away take billions of years to reach Earth, in contradiction to a universe age of thousands of years. Attempts to explain away the scientific evidence for the age of the universe of 13.7 billion years has also been incorporated. Young Earth creationists re-interpret phenomena such as galactic redshifts and the cosmic microwave background to fit into their beliefs, though there is no single creationist model which attempts to uphold the cosmic microwave background as interpreted by the Standard Model.
Creationist cosmologies are criticized for being pseudoscientific and rejected by the scientific community. The scientific consensus today is the Big Bang model, which was proposed in the 1920s and corroborated by Edwin Hubble's discovery of the Hubble Law in 1929, and later by the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation by Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson in 1964. These observations falsified all existing non-standard cosmologies.Other observational and theoretical inconsistencies were resolved by inflationary cosmology first described by Alan Guth in 1980 and this ad hoc model is now incorporated in the best-supported concordance model of cosmology.
Old Earth creationists, such as Hugh Ross' Reasons to Believe ministry, have defended mainstream cosmology against attacks from young Earth creationists.

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