Re: Geometric evidence of an old galaxy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dr. David Campbell" <amblema@bama.ua.edu>
To: "ASA list" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2005 1:10 PM
Subject: Geometric evidence of an old galaxy

> >New Science "Sciencexpress" articles have been made available (for
> the period 1 Dec 2005 to 8 Dec 2005):
>
> The Distance to the Perseus Spiral Arm in the Milky Way
> Y. Xu, M. J. Reid, X. W. Zheng, and K. M. Menten
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1120914v1?etoc
> p. 11209141<
>
> They were able to use triangulation to measure the distance-just over
> 6000 light years. As a relatively close part of our own galaxy, this
> distance indicates that the light from other galaxies would require
> well over 10,000 years to reach us, unless basic geometry doesn't
> hold.

Yes, this is certainly significant evidence (if any more were needed)
against YEC claims. (Though of course "The light was created in transit" is
still good for laughs.) But besides that, it shows the tremendous advance
in astrophysical techniques over the past few decades. ~1970 trigonometric
parallax was only good out to a few hundred LY. Being able to measure
distances more than 10 times that is something.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
Received on Sat Dec 10 21:28:27 2005