Creation Science Rebuttals -

The Mystery of Red Sirius

31 March 2006

     The 31 March 06 daily feature for the young earth creation science ministry Creation Moments discusses the star Sirius.

     The author gives three accounts of ancient astronomers, first in 2,000 BC, then in 50 BC, and then in 150 AD, which all say that the star Sirius was red.  However, it is now white.  This is said to be a problem for old earth astronomy, as it should take at least 100,000 years for a red giant to collapse into a white dwarf.

     There is some truth here, and some fiction.  First, one must realize that Sirius is a binary system, with two stars, Sirius A and Sirius B.  The star that Creation Moments refers to, Sirius B, is 10,000 times dimmer than Sirius A, and is not even visible to the naked eye.  Thus, the observations of thousands of years ago were not of Sirius B, but of Sirius A.

     Sirius B is a white dwarf, but Sirius A is not.  It is certain that Sirius A, a white giant, was not red thousands of years ago.  If Sirius B was red thousands of years ago, we would not have known it, because it was not visible to the naked eye, and was only discovered in 1930 (it was first proposed in 1844, confirmed in 1862, observed in 1915).  This fact alone disproves the young earth claim.

     Other explanations exist for Sirius being red thousands of years ago.  It is possible that a cloud of gas was between us and Sirius, altering the appearance of the star.  Most likely, however, and documented in several works, is that the star, when viewed low on the horizon, can appear to be red.  Thus, the ancients may have viewed it low on the horizon.  There is good evidence for this, because there are other astronomer reports from thousands of years ago, and they describe Sirius as white.  Clearly, it could not be both red and white at the same time, so something was altering the perception of some of the astronomers, such as the viewing angle.

     One more point bears mentioning.  Even if a visible star went from red to a white dwarf in a few thousand years, this does not mean that the universe is young.  It may mean we have to alter our theories about the process of this conversion, but it has nothing to do with age.  The rest of astronomy, the Big Bang, and the speed of light, which takes billions of years to get to earth, are all still in place unaffected by this star transformation process.

     This argument has been beaten to death by the young earth community, yet it is easily shown to be false.  Why they keep using it is a mystery.

For More Reading

Star Classification (Wikipedia)

Sirius (University of Illinois)

Sirius (Picture of the Day, NASA)

Sirius (Wikipedia)

Sirius (The Electronic Sky)

Sirius Young Earth Rebuttal (Talk Origins)

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