Notes from Pantheist (Secular) Astronomy (November 5 2022)

I found a copy of Astronomy magazine (April 2022) at a second-hand store, and there were a few interesting mini-articles, that is, interesting when looking at it through the lens of Biblical Creationism:

NEWFOUND PLANET'S HOST STARS ARE MOST MASSIVE YET, pg. 11

Newfound planet b Centauri b is a problem for the standard model of planet evolution, because it orbits "a pair of stars so massive that they challenge [their] ideas of how planets and stars form". In the conventional model, "dust grains surrounding the fledgling star" supposedly "begin glomming on to each other" and "this process of accumulation eventually snowballs". But the problem is that "stars that hot emit powerful ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, which should disrupt the planet-forming process".

The report simply indicates that "perhaps a planet like b Centauri b formed through a top-down process, more like a star: There may have been enough surrounding gas left over from the star's formation that some of it eventually collapsed under its own weight, directly forming a planet". Another idea, not considered in the report, is that the planet was created by God and did not form from dust or from clouds of gas.

MORE MISSING DARK MATTER, pg. 12

Using the Very Large Array in New Mexico, "researchers examined a galaxy named AGC 114095" and found that "the motions of the hydrogen gas within AGC 114905 can be completely explained if the galaxy only contains mass from the normal matter visible within it. And so far, the team hasn't been able to identify a plausible explanation for why there is no dark matter".

This is a problem for the pantheist (secular) view of the evolution of the universe, in which the universe exploded from a singularity and then very slowly formed itself through natural processes. From this perspective, if dark matter exists at all, you should be able to find it mixed in everywhere. So a galaxy that does not contain dark matter is an anomaly.

Setting aside the question of whether dark matter exists at all, this is fundamentally not a problem for Biblical Creationists, who believe that the galaxies were formed by God in a monumental act on the fourth day of creation.