More Than Meets the Eye

by Richard Swenson

  Ninety-nine percent of all the usable energy on Earth originates from the sun.20

  In one second the sun gives off more energy than all the people in history have “produced” during their entire stay on Earth.21

  Like all stars, the sun’s power plant is a continuously exploding nuclear fusion reaction. The energy from these explosions is released in the form of photons. Earthbound photons take eight minutes to reach the surface of our planet. Even though the amount of energy carried by each photon is tiny, trillions of them hit each square meter of Earth every second.

  The core temperature of the sun is fifteen million degrees centigrade. It is so hot that a pinhead heated to the temperature of the center of the sun “would emit enough heat to kill anyone who ventured within a thousand miles of it,” explained physicist Sir James Jeans.22 The surface temperature is considerably cooler, a mere six thousand degrees centigrade. But as we go above the surface, to the sun’s corona, the temperatures can rise again dramatically, to as high as one million degrees.

  Even though the energy generated in its nuclear furnace is predictable day in and day out, nevertheless solar conditions change frequently. Within the layers of the sun’s surface we can see all manner of unruly disturbances.

  Sun spots are dark patches that appear on the surface of the sun, some of which can be seen from Earth with the naked eye. They were observed by the Chinese over two thousand years ago and were also well known to Galileo. Sun spots can be very large, even five times larger than the earth, and are caused by massive magnetic field fluctuations that cool areas of the sun. Sun spots phase dramatically in eleven-year cycles. When sun spots are frequent, it is possible to witness dozens of them in a group. A sun spot can develop and persist for periods ranging from hours to months.

  Solar flares are the most violent events on the sun. These sudden explosive eruptions release the energy equivalent to millions of nuclear bombs. When sun spots increase, so do solar flares. When particularly active, they can be seen every few hours. When inactive, flares can be weeks apart. They typically last a few minutes, and during this brief time they can eject tremendous volumes of energy rays and charged particles into space.

  Various solar disturbances and storms can affect not only the sun’s surface but the entire solar system as well. A 1989 solar storm caused a province-wide blackout in Quebec. The same event melted coils in a transformer station in Salem, New Jersey, leading to a fire and a regional power outage. A more recent solar flare shot a gigantic magnetic cloud toward the earth. It measured thirty million miles in diameter and was moving a million miles an hour!

  Whenever confronted by such facts, I ask myself questions about God. If we witness a magnetic cloud thirty million miles in diameter moving a million miles per hour—is God bigger than that? Can He move faster than that? If the center of the sun has temperatures of fifteen million degrees centigrade and pressures of seven trillion pounds per square inch—could God walk into the core of the sun, take a nap, and walk back out? Every impressive structure or event in the universe should remind us of a God who is greater than all His works. With a God this powerful, why do we doubt that He has the power to help us order our lives?

  “There is nothing of a physical nature that is more friendly to man, or more necessary to his well-being, than the sun,” said David E. Lilienthal, former chairman of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission. “From the sun you and I get every bit of our energy, the chemical energy, energy that gives life and sustains life; that builds skyscrapers, and churches; that writes poems and symphonies.”23 All true. But the gift is not an anonymous one, for: “Back of the bread is the snowy flour; and back of the flour the mill. And back of the mill is the wheat and the shower, and the sun and the Father’s will.”24

  THE PLANETS

  Circling the sun in orderly fashion is a diverse array of planets, moons, asteroids, and dust. All planetary orbits except Pluto’s are essentially flat with respect to each other, within seven degrees.25 Each planet has its own characteristics, even personality. A few brief highlights may be of interest:

  Venus (#2) is very much like the earth in size, density, and mass. Yet scarcely can it be considered a kindred spirit. Venus takes almost eight months to rotate once on its axis, making for some pretty long days. The rotation is in retrograde direction east-to-west, the only planet to do so. Venus’s atmospheric pressure is ninety times that of Earth’s. Low clouds of carbon dioxide and upper clouds dripping with sulfuric acid result in surface temperatures of nearly a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Hurricane winds whip continuously around the planet, accompanied by repeated lightning strikes and deafening thunder. Not a prime honeymoon destination.

  Earth (#3), the “blue planet,” moves in orbit at seventy-two thousand miles per hour in order to complete its annual circle around the sun. A change in distance from the sun by a mere 2 percent would void our planet of life.26 Earth’s magnetic field (not all planets have magnetic fields) shields us from dangerous radiation, as most of the sun’s charged atomic particles are deflected around the earth. Our moon has a diameter almost one-fourth that of the earth but only one-eightieth the mass. Its noon temperature is +200 degrees Fahrenheit and its midnight temperature is a frosty -200 degrees. If the moon did not exist, neither would we. The earth would rotate three times faster, subjecting us to continuous gale force winds. In addition, without the moon, the earth’s axis would be catastrophically influenced by Jupiter’s gravitational pull.27

  In their recent book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, geologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee do a reluctant dance with the miraculous odds, stopping just short of invoking the Divine. “It appears that we have been quite lucky,” they write, explaining how the development of life on our hospitable planet required a “fortuitous assemblage” of the correct elements and “an intricate set of nearly irreproducible circumstances.”28

  “If some god-like being could be given the opportunity to plan a sequence of events with the express goal of duplicating our ‘Garden of Eden,’ that power would face a formidable task,” they observe. “With the best intentions, but limited by natural laws and materials, it is unlikely that Earth could ever be truly replicated. Too many processes in its formation involved sheer luck.” The conclusion: “It appears that Earth got it just right.”29

  Mars (#4), half the size of Earth, is not our closest neighbor— Venus is. Yet Mars has captured both our affection and imagination. It is the only planet that gives us a good view of its surface. Mars is called the “red planet” due to its rust-colored soil. For a century it was thought by many to have canals cutting across the surface, but the Mariner spacecraft in 1969 revealed these to be a chance alignment of large craters. Mars has two polar ice caps of frozen carbon dioxide, or “dry ice.”

  Jupiter (#5) is by far the largest of the planets. It is so immense that over one thousand Earths could be placed inside it. Because of its extraordinary speed of rotation—a day on Jupiter is only ten hours—surface winds are a thousand miles per hour. It has at least sixteen different moons, the largest named Io. Most interesting is the protection Jupiter affords planet Earth. Were Jupiter not positioned precisely so, comets would strike our planet a thousand times more frequently than they do.30 If Earth is the quarterback, Jupiter is a giant offensive lineman, blocking everything in sight.

  Saturn (#6) wins the beauty contest. Its seven individual rings, first discovered by Galileo in 1610, are not only glorious but gigantic. The rings are thin, flat, and detached. They average less than a few hundred yards thick and are composed of countless separate particles of all sizes. Saturn is second in size to Jupiter, 750 times the volume of Earth. Two of its many moons do a strange orbital dance. Once every four years their respective orbits intersect each other. Just before collision, however, the two moons actually switch orbits. If only Californians would learn to drive as courteously.

  In his famous Principia of 1687—which Hawking called the most influential ph
ysics book ever written—Isaac Newton penned the simple phrase “Thus God arranged the planets at distances from the sun.” Although very much ahead of his time in understanding the precision of planetary balance, Newton could hardly have guessed just how advanced that knowledge is in astrophysics today. Either the precision in our solar system and universe was preordained, or the human race won the yotta-lottery.31 Either way, the facts force us to believe a miracle.

  FROM BLACK HOLES TO QUASARS

  Although it might seem that the fine-tuning alluded to above is specifically a matter of our solar system, such is not the case. The entire universe and all its various structures are participants in an engineering design accomplishment that staggers the imagination. Before we leave this chapter, let’s become better acquainted with some of the more prominent players in God’s architectural cosmic display.

  Black holes are the stuff of science fiction and nightmares, of Alfred Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone. We are all fascinated with black holes but have no desire to meet one in a dark alley. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” was Dante’s caution placed at the entrance of hell. According to Hawking, it is a sign that could also be appropriately placed at the entrance of a black hole.

  No matter how mysterious or frightening black holes are, every galaxy has them. Our own Milky Way galaxy apparently has many of them. It is even possible that the number of black holes in the universe might be larger than the number of visible stars.

  Where do black holes come from? Essentially they are burned-out imploded stars. Massive stars are torn by two opposing forces: fusion pushes out, while gravity pulls in. The perpetual hydrogen-bomb fusion reaction within the core of the star continuously blasts matter and energy outward; but the incredible mass of the star has the opposite effect, as gravitational forces continuously attempt to make the star collapse in on itself. When all of the fusion material is exhausted, there is nothing left to counteract gravity. The star implodes.

  So far this does not sound very dramatic. The drama comes when we try to figure out when and how this implosion ends. The answer is: never. The star shrinks continuously, compacting its mass and greatly increasing its density. First, it implodes to one-half its original size, then one-tenth, then one-thousandth, then one-trillionth. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, this star—like political reputations or movie stars’ careers—can continue to exist forever in a state of permanent free fall without ever reaching the bottom. Such a state of permanent free fall is called a black hole.32

  Because its collapsing density rapidly approaches infinity, the gravitational pull from this tiny dimensionless point is enormous. Anything that comes into the vicinity of a black hole will begin to feel the effects of its immense gravitational pull. There is a point of proximity to the black hole where it becomes impossible to escape. This is called the “event horizon”—where the escape velocity becomes greater than the speed of light. Once past the event horizon, everything is sucked inside as if by an enormous vacuum cleaner. Even photons of light are captured by it. Thus the name black hole.

  Each object being pulled into the black hole suffers the same fate—inexorable compression down to a single point in space, and finally, to zero size. From this quantum nothingness, theoretical new universes can appear, and time itself ends. Some even speculate time can travel backwards within a black hole. “I don’t think there’s any question that a person could travel back in time while in a black hole,” says Princeton physicist Richard Gott. “The question is whether he could ever emerge to brag about it.”33

  To bring some perspective, if our sun were to become a black hole it would first have to collapse its radius from the present 450 thousand miles down to 2 miles. A teaspoonful of such a compressed sun would weigh about as much as all of Mount Everest. To make a black hole out of the earth we would need to crush it into a sphere whose radius was less than one-half inch.34

  Only stars one and a half times as massive as our sun are “eligible” to become black holes. If a star does not have sufficient mass, it cannot collapse with sufficient force to trigger the black hole phenomenon. When stars smaller than our sun burn out, for example, they collapse, but finally reach a stable size and become dense neutron stars.

  If our sun were to become a black hole (it cannot—its mass is insufficient), the earth would not notice any change in gravitational pull. The sun or its resultant black hole would have essentially the same gravitational pull on us.35 The most important difference we would notice is the total absence of light, which would prove fatal within a few days.

  Although a small minority of scientists is still reluctant to believe in black holes, both theory and experimental evidence increasingly support their existence. There is good observational evidence from X-ray data and from the Hubble Space Telescope that there are mammoth black holes—with masses more than a million times that of the sun—in the centers of some galaxies.

  Black holes are a mystical phenomenon in which, according to Clifford Pickover, “all the laws and properties of our physical universe shatter, where gravity turns time and space into subatomic putty, and God divides by zero.”36 Is God intimidated by them? Do you think God ever takes on a black hole, perhaps challenging it to a tug of war on a Sunday afternoon in Heaven? Can He stand inside the event horizon, taunting the black hole, and not get sucked in? A God who is that powerful certainly has enough majesty left over to help me get through the day.

  Neutron stars are the smallest stars known. Our galaxy contains an estimated hundred million of them. Typically a neutron star has a diameter of only ten miles yet as much mass as our sun. Thus they are incredibly dense. A neutron star’s interior consists of a material called neutronium, which is so dense that a thimbleful would weigh one hundred million tons. It is a hundred trillion times denser than ordinary matter.

  Neutron stars form when burned-out stars (actually, exploding supernovas) collapse but do not have enough mass to become a black hole. Instead, the powerful nuclear forces within the star’s atoms fight back—and win. The end result is their matter increasingly compresses until it becomes a hyperdense neutron star. The enormous densities within the neutron star are similar to those encountered in the nucleus of the atom. In essence, a neutron star is an atomic nucleus the size of a city.37

  Pulsars are neutron stars that spin rapidly while emitting short regular “pulses” of radio waves. While a normal star rotates perhaps once a day or once a month (our own sun rotates about once a month), the hyperdense pulsars can rotate as much as 100 times a second. The bursts of radio waves—and in other cases visible light, X rays, and gamma radiation—are due to very powerful magnetic fields spinning with the star.

  Magnetars are similar to pulsars but spinning faster—at least 200 times a second. In addition, their magnetic fields are 100 times larger than ordinary neutron stars (and a trillion times larger than our sun’s), making them the largest known magnetic fields in the universe.38 Magnetars, which are rare, were first theoretically proposed in 1992 and then observed in 1998. The forces emitting from magnetars can crack their metal crust open, causing tremendous “starquakes.” If a magnetar were between us and the moon during such a starquake, it would instantly erase every cassette tape, ATM card, and hard drive on the planet. If closer, it would probably rip the iron atoms right out of our blood.39

  Gamma ray bursts were first seen—by accident—in the 1960s by Air Force spy satellites, confounding astronomers. Gamma rays are the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation, thousands of times more powerful than visible light. Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) were noted, at times, to be as bright as all the other stars in the universe combined—almost as if the Almighty were taking pictures using God-sized flashbulbs. These seemingly random flashes of intense high-energy radiation can release ten thousand times the total energy our sun will emit over its entire lifetime. The exact source of GRBs is still unknown, although astronomers suspect super-supernovae or mutually annihilating neutron stars.


  Supernovas are tremendous explosions that destroy an entire star. After the eruption, the luminosity suddenly increases by millions or even billions of times over normal levels. This dramatic increase in brightness, which can outshine the entire home galaxy, will last for a few weeks and then slowly dim. The most famous supernova, recorded by Chinese and Korean observers in 1054, was bright enough to be seen during the day. The last supernova in our Milky Way galaxy occurred in 1604 and was observed by Kepler.

  Quasars are rare distant entities that, when first discovered in the 1960s, were thought to be mysterious stars—thus the name quasistellar, later shortened to quasar. Instead of being nearby stars, however, these mysterious objects originate from the deep recesses of space and are moving away from us at rates approaching the speed of light. Quasars are extremely luminous at all wavelengths. They can be a thousand times brighter than entire galaxies, even though the galaxies are a hundred thousand times larger in size than the quasar. This intense brightness seems to emanate from the central core of the quasar. To explain such a high-energy phenomenon seemingly requires invoking exotic interpretations of Einstein’s general relativity.

  Nebulae are clouds of dust particles and gas. The name comes from the Latin word for “cloud.” Diffuse nebulae are large collections of dust and gases, often containing enough material to form a hundred thousand stars.

  Comets are small bodies with very eccentric elliptical orbits. As they approach their swing around the sun, frozen material vaporizes, forming a long tail of gas and dust. The tail of a comet is “about as close as you can get to nothing at all.” If compressed, a cubic mile’s worth of tail material would not even fill a shoebox.40

  Asteroids are small planet-like bodies (also called minor planets or planetoids) that belong to our solar system. Known asteroids number in the thousands, although it has been estimated that probably millions of smaller asteroids exist that are less than the size of boulders. The largest known asteroid is about 600 miles in diameter. Most orbit in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. At least 300, however, have elliptical orbits that cross the orbit of Earth. By one estimate there are 1,500 Earth-crossing asteroids larger than a kilometer, and 135,000 Earth-crossing asteroids larger than 100 meters.41