By Spike Psaris

Creation Astronomy News an intermittent newsletter from CreationAstronomy.com Volume XVII, Number 1 (July 2026) Earth as seen from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA In this issue: Uranus: more evidence for youth International ministry update Secular model still says: Earth shouldn’t have any water   The Hubble Space Telescope has been used to study Uranus. Left: a 2006 image shows the moon Ariel transiting across and casting a shadow on the planet. Right: a 2017 image shows an aurora in the planet’s upper atmosphere. Credit: NASA Uranus: more evidence for youth Back in 1986 (forty years ago!), Voyager II flew by Uranus. It remains the only time a spacecraft has visited the greenish-blue ice giant. Since then, scientists have continued to study the planet from afar. Multiple studies (such as this and more recently this) have wrestled with a long-term trend: Uranus is getting colder. At least, its upper atmosphere’s temperature is falling continuously. Ever since Voyager II flew by, the temperature has decreased by about 8K (about 14 degrees Fahrenheit) per year. Left: The launch of Voyager 2 in 1977. Right: The trajectories of Voyager 1 and 2 through the outer solar system. Credit: NASA Secular scientists are stumped by this. Obviously, the planet can’t have been doing this for billions of years. Therefore, they reason, this must be part of a cycle of some sort. Although the planet is cooling now, at other times it must get warmer…But there is no apparent cause for such a cycle. The most obvious source of temperature variations would be varying levels of energy from the Sun, especially as it goes through its 11-year solar cycle. But observations have not supported this. As this paper found, even while the solar wind’s power increased by 15%, Uranus’s thermospheric temperature decreased by 18%.Another possibility is seasonal variations. But after roughly 40 years of observation, we have data for almost one-half of a full Uranian orbit. As expected, Uranus has unusual weather patterns. (The planet is tilted over by more than 90 degrees, after all.) Still, we’ve been watching it long enough for seasonal effects to be apparent. And the observed variations are minor. Secular scientists are left scratching their heads over all this. From their perspective, there just doesn’t seem to be any reason for the planet to be cooling off. But it is. Nor does it make sense that this has been going on for billions of years. Here’s a thought. Maybe Uranus hasn’t actually been doing this for billions of years, because it’s not billions of years old. Maybe it was created much more recently (just thousands of years ago, not billions), and it is still cooling off from its formation. That would explain what we see. That would also explain why Uranus still has a magnetic field today. (Its magnetosphere is very strange; it’s tilted and offset from the center of the planet. This means it can’t be the result of a dynamo. And if it’s not from a dynamo, it must be from remanent magnetism, but this can’t last for billions of years.)And it would be consistent with many other similar examples in the Solar System, where we see bodies that have internal heat or magnetic fields or other features that shouldn’t exist anymore after billions of years, but still exist today anyway.Science is supposed to be about finding the best explanation for the observed data. But when an excellent, and in this case, correct explanation is automatically excluded, then whatever model is accepted will be incorrect by definition.   International ministry update Long-time readers will remember that (almost) every year, I participate in an outreach in the Philippines. We give creation presentations in schools, and at the end of each session, a pastor presents the Gospel in the local language (even in the public schools!). Then each student receives a free creation devotional. Students and teachers receive free copies of a full-color devotional, with daily creation science topics and Bible verses. During this year’s trip, we gave presentations in 24 different schools, often with multiple sessions per school. After the rest of the mission team left, I stayed behind and did 17 more sessions on my own, including several at a state university. Total students and teachers reached: 17,500. This school had us give two three-hour seminars. Lord willing, later this year I will be participating in several creation conferences in southeast Asia, alongside Dr. Brian Thomas of ICR (the Institute for Creation Research). After that, there are more Philippines school sessions being scheduled.   Earth as seen from the Galileo spacecraft on Dec. 12, 1990. The Pacific Ocean fills almost the entire picture. Credit: NASA/JPL Secular model still says: Earth shouldn’t have any water Viewers of my Solar System video might remember that the Solar Nebula model — the primary secular model for the Solar System’s formation, which says that the Solar System formed from a cloud of gas and dust billions of years ago — predicts that the Earth shouldn’t have any water on it, or in it. Nevertheless, about 70 percent of our planet is covered in the stuff. And there’s water in the Earth’s mantle too. As the article link above explains, secular scientists used to claim that comets supplied Earth’s water after our planet formed. But once we examined comets more closely, it turned out that their water has too much deuterium to be the source of Earth’s oceans.(More recently, a few comets were discovered to have deuterium ratios that more closely match our oceans. But the fact remains that the average comet deuterium ratio is far too high for comets to be a viable explanation.)Therefore, the most popular explanation today for Earth’s water is that it came from millions of asteroid collisions. But that idea has problems too. Two recent studies have confirmed that secular models still can’t explain our planet’s water. The first study verified that according to the Solar Nebula model, the primordial Earth was “strongly depleted in volatile elements” such as water. The researchers interpreted this as evidence that Earth’s water must have been delivered later, via a huge collision with a hypothetical ancient planet named Theia. (Some readers will recognize that this is the same alleged collision that produced the Earth’s Moon, an idea which also doesn’t work.)Appealing to Theia is an implicit admission that other potential water-delivery mechanisms, such as comets and asteroids, don’t work. (Not to mention that this is an unobserved, purely hypothetical object in the past, for which there’s no evidence.)The second study wasn’t specifically about Earth, but it’s being applied to our planet anyway. The authors reported the results of experiments combining hydrogen with magma (molten rock); they found that oxygen released from the magma would react with hydrogen, and water would form. Although the authors were studying hypothetical conditions on sub- Neptune’s (planets which range in size from roughly double that of Earth, up to that of Neptune), articles like this one are speculating that maybe Earth could have made its own water via this mechanism. But there’s a major problem with this suggestion. The experiments didn’t use hydrogen gas; instead, “warm, dense hydrogen fluid” was necessary to produce the water. A sub-Neptune, far more massive than Earth, could potentially produce the gravitational force (and thus, the atmospheric pressure) for hydrogen to exist in this condition. But Earth? Not so much. Earth’s oceans contain almost 1.4 billion km3 (332.5 million cubic miles) of water. The mantle contains another one to three times that amount, chemically bound into the rocks. One might say that water is one of the defining features of our planet. But secular models continue to predict that Earth shouldn’t have any at all. Psalm 19:1-4 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. [There is] no speech nor language, [where] their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Spike Psarris www.CreationAstronomy.com

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