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Shrinking Sun Debate and Poll |
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PRO 1
Since 1836, the diameter of the sun
has been measured to be shrinking about 5 ft. per hour. By going back in history
and studying solar eclipses, scientists say that this shrinkage appears to be
constant. Extrapolating backward, we find that the sun would have been so large
one million years ago that no life at all could have existed on this earth. If
we went back 20 million, which is still far short of the 5 billion many
evolutionists claim as the age of the solar system, the edge of the sun would
have touched the earth. The earth would have exploded long before the sun ever
got that close.
CON 2
A recent measurement of the solar diameter is that of Brown & Christensen-Dalsgaard (1998). From data taken over the period 1981-1988, they report a radius of 695,508 +- 26 km, with no evidence of change over time. Even over such a short period of time, their time series is sufficient to exclude an ongoing shrinking at the Akridge rate of five feet per hour, albeit at a modest statistical confidence level. I extracted the data from figure 2 in Brown & Christensen-Dalsgaard (1998) and did some line fitting, finding that the best fit to the data is a slight, statistically insignificant, growth of the diameter of the sun. No support whatsoever for shrinkage.
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