The play on words in the title of this post is not accidental. Bob rather clearly gloats over his (perceived) debate successes. But one place where his self-congratulatory effusiveness has been most pronounced is when he has spoken of the Hubble Deep Field.
Now for heck’s sake, download and listen to the following claim from Bob made on March 7th, 2002 in BEL program #47, titled “Jim, Jerry, Perry, Tom, and Jim”. Feel free to start at the front, but specifically the following that starts 2 minutes into the program:
Why the Frequent Retelling of This Story?
So over a period of 3+ years Bob repeatedly claims he was right and NASA was wrong in the HDF issue. He discussed HDF not once or twice, but at least 8 times. In several of these accounts his claim is not presented as an observation of fact, but what is clearly bragging. Certain types of personalities need such attention. It is for the reader to decide what impression Bob’s presentations leave them with. We will focus on the technical details of what he said to see if stands up to scrutiny.
Twinkle gone – When looking at stars they appear to twinkle. This is due to distortions in the incoming light due to the changing temperatures and pressures of the layers of the atmosphere. The Hubble was the first major telescope in orbit, where problems due to atmospheric distortions are eliminated.
The Atmospheric Window – Electromagnetic radiation comes in a wide spectrum of frequencies. A very narrow band of those frequencies are the ones our eyes are sensitive to, and that we call visible light. Interestingly, the atmosphere is transparent to the same frequencies that our eyes depend on, and the atmosphere is largely opaque to (meaning it blocks) the frequencies above and below those our eyes can see. But the light emitted by stars and galaxies is of many frequencies, some in the wavelengths that the atmosphere filters out. So an orbiting telescope would be able to observe in wavelengths that no ground-based telescope can.
Bang - One of the justifications for putting the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit was the ability it would bring of investigating questions about the earlier stages of the universes existence – the time shortly after the Big Bang.
Expensive. For the Hubble to perform its mission and return the data to earth requires an impressive array of supporting facilities. Hubble is almost continuously streaming down reams of measurements encoded in radio communications. These communications are relayed through a continually shifting array of satellites and ground communication sites.
From the moment it became fully operational (after an engineering snafu was corrected by astronauts in orbit shortly after its launch) the demand on Hubble’s limited time has been intense. If you want to use Hubble to support your project in astronomy, you need to prepare a written proposal detailing how long you will need it, and what you hope to see with Hubble. Your proposal will be considered by an evaluations and scheduling committee along with the myriad of proposals from other scientists.
Just considering the sheer volume of time that is requested of the Hubble shows that less than 1 proposal in 5 can be granted. It would take more than 5 Hubbles in orbit to do what is being asked of the one.
Now let’s look at the specific event to which Bob refers. As Bob says, in 1995 NASA decided to focus the Hubble on one small speck of black sky. Since one of the justifications for launching the Hubble was to study the big bang, it was hoped, or even expected, that looking at Galaxies from “across the universe” would mean we would be looking at galaxies shortly after the big bang (“shortly” being hundreds of millions of years – short in astronomical time). There is considerable theoretical work dealing how galaxies might form, and not all of it agrees. So to help sort out the ideas that best fit the evidence it was decided to actually see if early galaxies, “young” galaxies, if you will, might be seen.
A spot in the sky almost devoid of visible galaxies (even through telescopes) was chosen. In fact there were already some known objects in that field, but far less than a typical piece of the night sky would have. This unpopulated view was chosen so most of whatever was seen would not be bright galaxies and stars that are “close”, possibly obscuring the desired distant ones. “Close” is enclosed in parenthesis because most studies of galaxies reach only a few percent of the way across the universe, so anything more than a few billion light years away is “far”, even for most telescopes.
Since the young galaxies that were being looked for would be so distant, the intensity of the light from them would be incredibly dim. NASA scheduled 10 continuous days of pointing the Hubble at the selected spot in the sky.
This 10 day block of time is significant. With the high demand on the Hubble’s time already mentioned above, to allocate a 10-day block of continuous viewing time means all competing requests for the Hubble are put on hold. This would only be justified if the study was very important. To make an analogy – some of you may have visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It is normally a very busy place, with several tours going on concurrently, classes being conducted, maintenance, religious ceremonies, and so on. If a note were posted on the door of Saint Peter’s saying it was closed for the next 10 days so the choir can have it exclusively for practice – that better be the choir performance of all time.
In fact it was realized that enough studies were awaiting the type of data that the Hubble Deep Field (HDF) would generate that it was decided to charge the time to the manager’s discretionary budget. The manager of the Hubble project is allowed to hold a certain percentage of the Hubble’s viewing time in reserve to give to projects that are outside the standard proposal and budgeting process. HDF was a gift from the Hubble manager to a whole community of waiting scientists.
Bob, at the end of BR VII, post 7, posted a small copy of the resulting HDF picture. There are a number of better copies at http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/hdf.html. This is the home page of the scientific organization that operates the Hubble. Now let’s look at Bob’s claim. He says that when the photograph was developed, it showed galaxies just like we see in our night sky. And he is right. On some of them. The nearer ones.
As mentioned, HDF was a look much deeper into space than anything before. No one in the scientific community was under the misguided impression that the dark patch of sky chosen for Hubble would be an empty corridor through space to the young galaxies on the other side. It was fully expected, and seen, that a number of old galaxies would yet lie within the field of view. These old galaxies are vast distances from earth - several billions of light years - so most are invisible to all but the best telescopes. Had NASA fortuitously chosen an empty corridor to the edge, then that would have given NASA the shock of its life.
The problem with trying to see the other edge of the universe is that we are looking from here. “Here” means here in the vicinity of the Earth, deep in the “middle” of the universe, so that no matter which way we choose to look, we have to look through the clutter of the billions of galaxies that are close to us. There is simply no technology that allows us to take pictures from anywhere but “here”. It is as if a photographer who was restricted for his whole life to a downtown bench in a popular park in Denver wanted to study the very small animals in the nearby Rocky Mountains. He could put on a magnificent telescopic lens, but still the buildings and people and dogs and birds and trees and cars and such of Metropolitan Denver surround him in every direction. The best he might hope for is to pick a direction where such mundane nearby things are few, and he might catch a glimpse of a real Rocky Mountain baby Yeti behind the local clutter.
Bob chooses to look at the man a few blocks away in the photographer’s picture that wandered through the field of view, and then claim that proves that Rocky Mountain animals are just like Denver animals.
But the analysis of Bob’s claim really goes much deeper technically. And, unless Bob can provide the answers to some very pertinent questions, this will highlight the difference between Bob’s “science” and NASA’s science. Here is a question for Bob. If someone were to point to 2 separate objects in the HDF, could you, Bob, tell me which of the 2 is closer to us, and which is more distant? Bob may be right. Maybe those well-developed spiral galaxies are the really distant ones. How to tell? Bob seems comfortable with his decision that they are.
We could bring a well-qualified astronomer and give him the HDF picture and ask him the same question I posed to Bob - By looking at the picture, of two objects selected, which is closer? The astronomer just gave us a really disgusted look and rightfully called us dorks. We should have expected it. Because we know, and any two-bit astronomer knows, but apparently Bob doesn’t, that the objects in the HDF photo don’t come with little labels as to their distance.
If you want to know what objects in the HDF are close and which are far, you have to go outside the photo. To the accompanying data – red shift data. See, the HDF photo wasn’t originally a photo in the customary sense at all. The photo was created from sensor data from several instruments.
Probably the single most valuable instrument on the Hubble, and in much of astronomy, is the spectrometer. It is a device that looks at the incoming light and analyzes how intense the light is – at specific wavelengths. Light that appears white (a combination of all wavelengths) to you may appear much different to a spectrometer. The spectrometer may find the light is actually devoid of certain wavelengths.
When the Hubble was staring into the HDF speck of space, the spectrometers were busily analyzing what colors were in the light from each thing it saw. The degree to which the light from an astronomical object is shifted towards the red is the primary indication of the distance of the object. This is the idea that Sir Edwin Hubble came up with 8 decades ago.
Does Bob have the red shift data for the HDF? He likely didn’t even know that he would have to have it to make the claim he did. An interesting note – if you go to the SCSTI website linked above, it actually tells you how you can get that data. A lot of it is in the public domain. You would have to know how it is formatted so you could interpret it properly, but that is just a matter of some technical information that is also available from the same website. So Bob is invited, or anyone else, to make the claim Bob did, and back it with the real data. The data is available.
Let’s now turn to testimony, not from the amateur scientist that is the pastor of a small church in Denver, but to one of the scientists who launched the Hubble and did the HDF experiment – Dr. Bruce Margon. A couple of years ago he gave a talk about the Hubble, and his talk is available for viewing for over the web. Go to this site, set the speed of the web link you have, and enjoy an hour of real science. If you are in a hurry, sorry, because Dr. Margon doesn’t get to talking directly about the HDF until just after the 50 minute mark. For those of you who want the short and sweet, here is the transcript of what Dr. Margon says about HDF:
The original HDF was in 1995. The success was spectacular enough that NASA decided to do it again in 1998. But this time the speck of sky selected was in the southern skies, just to see if there was any significant difference between the original northern sky HDF and the southern one. It turns out the two HDFs showed much the same changes in early galaxies.
But the story doesn’t even end here. If, as Bob says, the HDF was such a flop, then NASA must have really gone off the deep end. You see, in the time since 1995 the Hubble was visited 3 times by astronauts. Every time they installed better instruments. The scientific community felt the results of HDF were important enough that they asked for an encore, using the Hubble’s improved eyesight. So in early 1994, HDF on steroids was released. This is known as UDF (or HUDF) for Hubble Ultra Deep Field. It was another view into the farthest reaches of space, similar to Hubble, but with the improved instrumentation, it reached back even earlier in time than the HDF was able to.
The formal meeting in which the NASA managers announced the release of the UDF data was in early 1994. The scientific interest in this data was so broad and intense that only a select circle of scientists were allowed to see the data at first. And their charge was not to get a head start on mining the data, but to package the data such that the scientific community could quickly pick it up and start analyzing it. Nobel prizes can flow out of such data, and in the interest of fairness, it was decided to make the entire set of public data ready for simultaneous release. Now, almost 2 years later, the analysis of the UDF data is intense. And the scientists have not been disappointed. The scientific papers just keep coming and coming and coming. That would be strange indeed, if the HDF (and UDF) were failures.
When someone realizes a claim they have made is not supportable, it is not uncommon to quietly let it drift into the past without further mention, and hope that no one notices. Did Bob do that? 8 times he expounds on the HDF in 3 years, and then silence. The timing of two things raises suspicions. Look again at what Bob said in December of 2003:
The second suspicion is that Bob’s silence on the issue is coincident with NASA’s announcement of the UDF follow-on to HDF.
2 – HDF was not the only picture. There was HDF – south, and then UDF. Strange for a project that supposedly failed right up front.
3 – Bob went silent on the issue just when the UDF came into the scientific arena.
Immediately after making the claim in the opening transcript at the top of this post, Bob gave some good counsel:
Clearly you should never trust those evolutionary atheistic space telescopes.
And galaxies did indeed go through an infancy and childhood.
Now for heck’s sake, download and listen to the following claim from Bob made on March 7th, 2002 in BEL program #47, titled “Jim, Jerry, Perry, Tom, and Jim”. Feel free to start at the front, but specifically the following that starts 2 minutes into the program:
Bob Enyart’s claimed success over NASA in the Hubble Deep Field (for brevity, and in conformance with common terminology, we will just refer to it as “HDF”) has been one of the stories he has related most often. In chronological order, here are the occasions when Bob has discussed the HDF:What happened a couple years ago when Hubble – they focused the lens on a tiny speck of black space – and they kept it there for a long time. And they said, "When the photograph is finally developed, when enough photons comes in, we’re going to see from that speck of outer space – we will see the earliest galaxies – the furthest galaxies we’ve ever seen. We’ll be looking at galaxies at the edge of the universe, and those galaxies – we’ll see them how they were billions and billions of years ago when they were very young. So they won’t be mature – the mature galaxies that we see in the night sky with ordinary telescopes."
And that was the prediction of the evolutionary astronomers, the atheistic astrophysicists, NASA. That’s what they were predicting. And here we go on Bob Enyart live, over the information radio network, and on KGOV.com - and I am the pastor of Denver Bible Church. I don’t have a degree in astronomy or astrophysics. And I said at the time, “No they won’t see that. When they develop this photograph they’re going to see what we see wherever we look in the night sky. They’ll see normal galaxies.”
And what was the result – does anybody remember? The galaxies were normal – just like we see everywhere else – spiral galaxies – they were normal!
Now how could that be? How could the pastor of Denver Bible Church get it right when the entire evolutionary scientific community involved in astronomy – when they got it wrong? How could that be?
#1 - Speaking With a Christian Physicist
November 7, 2000, in a program titled “Bob and the Physicist part 2”. In this program Bob briefly mentions the HDF (without using that term) a little after 6 minutes into the program. This is the first telling of the HDF by Bob that I have encountered. In this account, as in most of the later times Bob refers back to a prediction in which he said the galaxies in the HDF would appear the same as today’s galaxies. I would be interested in actually hearing that claim from when it was made.
#2 - In a Church Sermon
January 26, 2001, the BEL program is called “Astronomical Evidence “. This is a recording of a sermon Bob gave to his church congregation dealing with a number of astronomical issues. Just over 40 minutes into the show he talks for a minute about the HDF.
#3 - Talking about New Hubble Camera
March 7, 2002, was the BEL program titled “Jim, Jerry, Perry, Tom and Jim” that I have already provided the transcript for near the heading of this post.
#4 - Explaining HDF to a Caller
April 4, 2002, in BEL program “Venus Spins Backwards”, a bit after 28 minutes into the program Bob is speaking with Johnny, a caller. Bob takes a minute and recounts the HDF story.
#5 - Discussing Battle Royale VII
July 16, 2003. Note the title of the show is “Bob vs NASA”, in which you get a hint of what is talked about in the program. In part of this show Bob discusses his then-underway debate in Battle Royale VII. About 29 minutes and 20 seconds in, he bring up his use of HDF in the debate with Zakath. He spends some time talking about HDF and his alleged trumping of NASA.
#6 - More Discussion of Battle Royale VII
July 18, 2003 in the BEL program “A Trillion Years” Bob alludes back again to what he was saying at the end of the 7th round of Battle Royale VII. In this case, he ended his discussion (about 57 minutes into the show) of the Hubble with:“Bob Enyart predicted on-air in 80 cities that the atheistic NASA astrophysicists were wrong. I like saying that. Stephen Hawking is wrong. All right? Socrates, Plato, Aristotle - morons. The NASA atheists were wrong. And that the galaxies photographed would look just like any other group of galaxies. So then I end with a question to the atheist.It’s so fun. Because the photo shows normal galaxies. And you really get the strong impression that if Hubble focused again to a speck of black between the two smallest little specks in that photo, that it would generate another set of galaxies just like all the others. God made a big universe.“Zakath, who do you think was vindicated? The atheist NASA engineers in 1995 predicting that a developing Hubble photo would show galaxies forming, or the Christian talk-show host predicting the photo would show typical, not early galaxies. Hint, see photo below.”
#7 - General Musings about Space
December 5, 2003, in a show called Cincinnati Homicide, just before the 37 minutes mark he turns to once more talking about the Hubble Deep Field. Bob says something significant here. Towards the end of this discussion, Bob says:You see all these regular galaxies. And they say, “Oh way back there you see those little tiny tiny specks way in the back of the photograph?”
“Yeah”
“Well maybe they’re new galaxies forming.”
“Oh yeah.”
Well zoom in on them. Focus on them for 6 months and they will be the same as all these other ones in the foreground. Because galaxies did not evolve, God created them as galaxies.
#8 - Age of Earth Debate
February 28, 2004. During a debate with old-earth Christians in Denver, Bob mentions that Hubble shows that galaxies at great distances look the same as close by.
Why the Frequent Retelling of This Story?
So over a period of 3+ years Bob repeatedly claims he was right and NASA was wrong in the HDF issue. He discussed HDF not once or twice, but at least 8 times. In several of these accounts his claim is not presented as an observation of fact, but what is clearly bragging. Certain types of personalities need such attention. It is for the reader to decide what impression Bob’s presentations leave them with. We will focus on the technical details of what he said to see if stands up to scrutiny.
Why Hubble?
Twinkle gone – When looking at stars they appear to twinkle. This is due to distortions in the incoming light due to the changing temperatures and pressures of the layers of the atmosphere. The Hubble was the first major telescope in orbit, where problems due to atmospheric distortions are eliminated.
The Atmospheric Window – Electromagnetic radiation comes in a wide spectrum of frequencies. A very narrow band of those frequencies are the ones our eyes are sensitive to, and that we call visible light. Interestingly, the atmosphere is transparent to the same frequencies that our eyes depend on, and the atmosphere is largely opaque to (meaning it blocks) the frequencies above and below those our eyes can see. But the light emitted by stars and galaxies is of many frequencies, some in the wavelengths that the atmosphere filters out. So an orbiting telescope would be able to observe in wavelengths that no ground-based telescope can.
Bang - One of the justifications for putting the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit was the ability it would bring of investigating questions about the earlier stages of the universes existence – the time shortly after the Big Bang.
Cost?
Expensive. For the Hubble to perform its mission and return the data to earth requires an impressive array of supporting facilities. Hubble is almost continuously streaming down reams of measurements encoded in radio communications. These communications are relayed through a continually shifting array of satellites and ground communication sites.
Usage
From the moment it became fully operational (after an engineering snafu was corrected by astronauts in orbit shortly after its launch) the demand on Hubble’s limited time has been intense. If you want to use Hubble to support your project in astronomy, you need to prepare a written proposal detailing how long you will need it, and what you hope to see with Hubble. Your proposal will be considered by an evaluations and scheduling committee along with the myriad of proposals from other scientists.
Just considering the sheer volume of time that is requested of the Hubble shows that less than 1 proposal in 5 can be granted. It would take more than 5 Hubbles in orbit to do what is being asked of the one.
Getting the HDF Picture
Now let’s look at the specific event to which Bob refers. As Bob says, in 1995 NASA decided to focus the Hubble on one small speck of black sky. Since one of the justifications for launching the Hubble was to study the big bang, it was hoped, or even expected, that looking at Galaxies from “across the universe” would mean we would be looking at galaxies shortly after the big bang (“shortly” being hundreds of millions of years – short in astronomical time). There is considerable theoretical work dealing how galaxies might form, and not all of it agrees. So to help sort out the ideas that best fit the evidence it was decided to actually see if early galaxies, “young” galaxies, if you will, might be seen.
A spot in the sky almost devoid of visible galaxies (even through telescopes) was chosen. In fact there were already some known objects in that field, but far less than a typical piece of the night sky would have. This unpopulated view was chosen so most of whatever was seen would not be bright galaxies and stars that are “close”, possibly obscuring the desired distant ones. “Close” is enclosed in parenthesis because most studies of galaxies reach only a few percent of the way across the universe, so anything more than a few billion light years away is “far”, even for most telescopes.
10 days without Blinking in the Vatican
Since the young galaxies that were being looked for would be so distant, the intensity of the light from them would be incredibly dim. NASA scheduled 10 continuous days of pointing the Hubble at the selected spot in the sky.
This 10 day block of time is significant. With the high demand on the Hubble’s time already mentioned above, to allocate a 10-day block of continuous viewing time means all competing requests for the Hubble are put on hold. This would only be justified if the study was very important. To make an analogy – some of you may have visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It is normally a very busy place, with several tours going on concurrently, classes being conducted, maintenance, religious ceremonies, and so on. If a note were posted on the door of Saint Peter’s saying it was closed for the next 10 days so the choir can have it exclusively for practice – that better be the choir performance of all time.
Who Picks up the Tab on this One?
In fact it was realized that enough studies were awaiting the type of data that the Hubble Deep Field (HDF) would generate that it was decided to charge the time to the manager’s discretionary budget. The manager of the Hubble project is allowed to hold a certain percentage of the Hubble’s viewing time in reserve to give to projects that are outside the standard proposal and budgeting process. HDF was a gift from the Hubble manager to a whole community of waiting scientists.
The HDF Picture Itself
Bob, at the end of BR VII, post 7, posted a small copy of the resulting HDF picture. There are a number of better copies at http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/hdf/hdf.html. This is the home page of the scientific organization that operates the Hubble. Now let’s look at Bob’s claim. He says that when the photograph was developed, it showed galaxies just like we see in our night sky. And he is right. On some of them. The nearer ones.
As mentioned, HDF was a look much deeper into space than anything before. No one in the scientific community was under the misguided impression that the dark patch of sky chosen for Hubble would be an empty corridor through space to the young galaxies on the other side. It was fully expected, and seen, that a number of old galaxies would yet lie within the field of view. These old galaxies are vast distances from earth - several billions of light years - so most are invisible to all but the best telescopes. Had NASA fortuitously chosen an empty corridor to the edge, then that would have given NASA the shock of its life.
Life as a Photographer on a Denver Bench
The problem with trying to see the other edge of the universe is that we are looking from here. “Here” means here in the vicinity of the Earth, deep in the “middle” of the universe, so that no matter which way we choose to look, we have to look through the clutter of the billions of galaxies that are close to us. There is simply no technology that allows us to take pictures from anywhere but “here”. It is as if a photographer who was restricted for his whole life to a downtown bench in a popular park in Denver wanted to study the very small animals in the nearby Rocky Mountains. He could put on a magnificent telescopic lens, but still the buildings and people and dogs and birds and trees and cars and such of Metropolitan Denver surround him in every direction. The best he might hope for is to pick a direction where such mundane nearby things are few, and he might catch a glimpse of a real Rocky Mountain baby Yeti behind the local clutter.
Bob chooses to look at the man a few blocks away in the photographer’s picture that wandered through the field of view, and then claim that proves that Rocky Mountain animals are just like Denver animals.
Uhhh, Which Galaxy?
But the analysis of Bob’s claim really goes much deeper technically. And, unless Bob can provide the answers to some very pertinent questions, this will highlight the difference between Bob’s “science” and NASA’s science. Here is a question for Bob. If someone were to point to 2 separate objects in the HDF, could you, Bob, tell me which of the 2 is closer to us, and which is more distant? Bob may be right. Maybe those well-developed spiral galaxies are the really distant ones. How to tell? Bob seems comfortable with his decision that they are.
We could bring a well-qualified astronomer and give him the HDF picture and ask him the same question I posed to Bob - By looking at the picture, of two objects selected, which is closer? The astronomer just gave us a really disgusted look and rightfully called us dorks. We should have expected it. Because we know, and any two-bit astronomer knows, but apparently Bob doesn’t, that the objects in the HDF photo don’t come with little labels as to their distance.
Seeing Red
If you want to know what objects in the HDF are close and which are far, you have to go outside the photo. To the accompanying data – red shift data. See, the HDF photo wasn’t originally a photo in the customary sense at all. The photo was created from sensor data from several instruments.
Probably the single most valuable instrument on the Hubble, and in much of astronomy, is the spectrometer. It is a device that looks at the incoming light and analyzes how intense the light is – at specific wavelengths. Light that appears white (a combination of all wavelengths) to you may appear much different to a spectrometer. The spectrometer may find the light is actually devoid of certain wavelengths.
When the Hubble was staring into the HDF speck of space, the spectrometers were busily analyzing what colors were in the light from each thing it saw. The degree to which the light from an astronomical object is shifted towards the red is the primary indication of the distance of the object. This is the idea that Sir Edwin Hubble came up with 8 decades ago.
Does Bob have the red shift data for the HDF? He likely didn’t even know that he would have to have it to make the claim he did. An interesting note – if you go to the SCSTI website linked above, it actually tells you how you can get that data. A lot of it is in the public domain. You would have to know how it is formatted so you could interpret it properly, but that is just a matter of some technical information that is also available from the same website. So Bob is invited, or anyone else, to make the claim Bob did, and back it with the real data. The data is available.
The Scientific View
Let’s now turn to testimony, not from the amateur scientist that is the pastor of a small church in Denver, but to one of the scientists who launched the Hubble and did the HDF experiment – Dr. Bruce Margon. A couple of years ago he gave a talk about the Hubble, and his talk is available for viewing for over the web. Go to this site, set the speed of the web link you have, and enjoy an hour of real science. If you are in a hurry, sorry, because Dr. Margon doesn’t get to talking directly about the HDF until just after the 50 minute mark. For those of you who want the short and sweet, here is the transcript of what Dr. Margon says about HDF:
So Dr. Margon has a diametrically opposite view from the pastor about the success of HDF.There must have been a time when galaxies were originally born. But much to the fury of generations of observational astronomers, from the ground, when one takes deeper and deeper and deeper images of galaxies you just see the same thing smaller and fainter, smaller and fainter, smaller and fainter, smaller and fainter, more and more galaxies, further and further away. But they all still look sort of like these tranquil pinwheels.
On the other hand, there has to be some distance at which - if you look back far enough - you can see things that look very different, that look like galaxies being born. And one of the original goals of the Hubble Space Telescope was to reach this sort of first light. To be able to see galaxies far enough away that things look very different.
Well how do you do that? You take an extremely deep image of the sky. There was a totally boring piece of the sky selected in the Big Dipper, selected simply because there was nothing interesting in it. And Hubble was pointed at that piece of sky for an extremely long exposure. When you use your camera and you want to take a picture of something very faint you open the shutter and you leave it open. If you want to take a picture of something extremely faint, you leave the shutter open for a long time. The shutter on Hubble was left open for 10 consecutive days to expose this very tiny patch of sky – only 1% of the area of the full moon.
When you see a ground-based picture of this piece of sky, you see 8 or 10 kind of uninteresting little dots. The Hubble image of this piece of sky, which goes deeper than anything else ever taken by humankind, however, shows this. <refer to the HDF picture – ThePhy> Thousands and thousands of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars.
But more interesting, if you start to look at individual galaxies in the so-called Hubble Deep Field and you measure the distances, and therefore the ages of these galaxies – that is, how long has it taken the light to get to us - you begin to finally discern a pattern. Which is, the universe today is about 14 billion years old. As you start to look at distant galaxies, for example, here <see video – ThePhy> is something only 6 billion years after the big bang - kinda looks like today’s galaxies. Here’s something 3 billion years after the big bang – well it’s starting to look a little funny. Here’s something 2 billion years. One billion years after the big bang. Suddenly you don’t see the majestic pinwheels anymore. But rather you see little blobs which we believe are Hubble images of galaxies in the initial stage of assembly, seen for the very first time. A glimpse of the birth of the universe.
For Those Living on the Underside of the Earth
The original HDF was in 1995. The success was spectacular enough that NASA decided to do it again in 1998. But this time the speck of sky selected was in the southern skies, just to see if there was any significant difference between the original northern sky HDF and the southern one. It turns out the two HDFs showed much the same changes in early galaxies.
Even Deeper Fields
But the story doesn’t even end here. If, as Bob says, the HDF was such a flop, then NASA must have really gone off the deep end. You see, in the time since 1995 the Hubble was visited 3 times by astronauts. Every time they installed better instruments. The scientific community felt the results of HDF were important enough that they asked for an encore, using the Hubble’s improved eyesight. So in early 1994, HDF on steroids was released. This is known as UDF (or HUDF) for Hubble Ultra Deep Field. It was another view into the farthest reaches of space, similar to Hubble, but with the improved instrumentation, it reached back even earlier in time than the HDF was able to.
The formal meeting in which the NASA managers announced the release of the UDF data was in early 1994. The scientific interest in this data was so broad and intense that only a select circle of scientists were allowed to see the data at first. And their charge was not to get a head start on mining the data, but to package the data such that the scientific community could quickly pick it up and start analyzing it. Nobel prizes can flow out of such data, and in the interest of fairness, it was decided to make the entire set of public data ready for simultaneous release. Now, almost 2 years later, the analysis of the UDF data is intense. And the scientists have not been disappointed. The scientific papers just keep coming and coming and coming. That would be strange indeed, if the HDF (and UDF) were failures.
A Suspicious Silence
When someone realizes a claim they have made is not supportable, it is not uncommon to quietly let it drift into the past without further mention, and hope that no one notices. Did Bob do that? 8 times he expounds on the HDF in 3 years, and then silence. The timing of two things raises suspicions. Look again at what Bob said in December of 2003:
If you take the time to view Dr. Margon’s video presentation, he shows several of the highly red-shifted objects. And the clarity is enough that we don’t need to focus in on them for 6 months. They are not typical spiral galaxies. And the UDF peered even farther back in time. So Bob, we've been there and done that. And you are wrong.And they say, “Oh way back there you see those little tiny tiny specks way in the back of the photograph?”
“Yeah”
“Well maybe they’re new galaxies forming.”
“Oh yeah.”
Well zoom in on them. Focus on them for 6 months and they will be the same as all these other ones in the foreground. Because galaxies did not evolve, God created them as galaxies.
The second suspicion is that Bob’s silence on the issue is coincident with NASA’s announcement of the UDF follow-on to HDF.
Summary
1 – Bob comes to conclusions by looking at the HDF picture that cannot be made just from the picture.2 – HDF was not the only picture. There was HDF – south, and then UDF. Strange for a project that supposedly failed right up front.
3 – Bob went silent on the issue just when the UDF came into the scientific arena.
Applying the Pastor’s Yardstick
Immediately after making the claim in the opening transcript at the top of this post, Bob gave some good counsel:
The pastor of Denver Bible church made a prediction about HDF. And so did NASA. Whose credibility was enhanced by the predictions coming true?And you know prediction is the great test of scientific ideas. Scientific ideas gain credibility when you can make predictions, and they come true.
The Bottom Line
Clearly you should never trust those evolutionary atheistic space telescopes.
And galaxies did indeed go through an infancy and childhood.