Cotton Candy Planets and the Young Universe

It is amazing how astronomers can use technology to find planets outside our solar system, even so much as to speculate on their size and composition. Pictures of exoplanets are only artist concepts; the planets cannot be seen. Continued observations of activity in their solar systems can raise questions.

Transits in the Kepler-51 system caused some confusion, as they were not what was expected. While a number of large planets have been discovered, these seem to have a density comparable to cotton candy. Astronomers are looking for ways to explain what is happening.

Bags of cotton candy, Pexels / Magda Ehlers

These super-puff planets should not exist according to standard cosmology. Their cores lack density, which means they should not have atmospheres. How these puff daddies formed in the first place is a mystery, and one speculation about what's going on is that there is a great deal of dust kicked up by outflowing atmospheres — which should have dissipated millions of years ago according to secular belief systems. Actually, we see evidence yet again that the universe was created recently, it is not the product of imagined cosmic evolution.

Astronomers have inferred the presence of a fourth exoplanet in the Kepler-51 star system. They made the discovery when the third exoplanet in the system passed in front of its host star two hours sooner than their models predicted. The astronomers were able to account for this error by the existence of a fourth, previously unknown exoplanet. However, the most interesting aspect of this story for biblical creationists is that the three previously known exoplanets are called “super-puff” planets because they have extremely low densities. These low-density exoplanets challenge evolutionary models of planet formation, and they may also challenge the dogma of “billions of years."

Read the rest of this interesting article at "'Super-Puff' Exoplanets: Evidence of Youth?"