(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXVIII: Wherein We Experience Astronomical Buffoonery

Last time, we watched the Earth Science Fourth Edition authors butcher the birth of the solar system. They’re so very bad at telling the secular story, but bless them, they’re trying. We left them just as our Sun began to shine, and planetary potential swirled around it. Let’s watch as they continue to mangle the secular science story.

Gravitational attraction starts clumping matter into wee little proto-planets in what’s left of the protoplanetary disk. Of course, the disk is still turning. That original spin (ha) has translated into rotation and orbits and such. We know that a star’s going to suck up most of the gas in the inner solar system, leaving the planets closest to it rockier than the ones further out. These are the basics, and ES4 gets those basics basically right.

But then they claim that we claim that “other planetesimals were captured by planets as moons.” LOLWUT? They sound like we think that’s the only way for moons to happen. But in the case of our lovely gas giants, we know some of their moons couldn’t have been captured, but had to have formed from amterial orbiting the giants in rings. Other moons, like ours, formed from collisions. What’s the difference? The material thrown up by a collision contains a lot of rocky debris, but not a lot of gas, while the stuff orbiting the giants contains plenty of gas. Therefore, we see moons around the giants that are far more gassy than ours. Continue reading “(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXVIII: Wherein We Experience Astronomical Buffoonery”

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXVIII: Wherein We Experience Astronomical Buffoonery
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