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          • The First Light Has Fluctuations
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          • Not All Stars Formed on the Fourth Day
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The First Light Has Fluctuations

Several groups of astrophysicists have resolved the density fluctuations in the cosmic background into clusters of bright circular spots. The spots are a few tens of microkelvins warmer than their surroundings. The average warm spot is about a degree of arc in diameter, twice the apparent size of the Sun or Moon. What we now call the cosmic background was originally bright reddish light at about 3000 kelvins, but now its temperature is less than three kelvins. Therefore the spots were originally a few tens of millikelvins warmer than their surroundings. The difference in temperature was too small to make them noticeably brighter if anyone had been present to look, but the color difference might have been perceptible.
Picture
A false-color map shows the temperatures of the Earth’s sur-face for the month of June, 1992. The Earth looks like a spherical globe when we are far out from it in space but the mapmakers have used an oval shape to show both sides of the Earth at once.
Researchers often display their results with false color photographs that bring out the small differences in temperature. In these photographs the spots look like stars. The spots are not stars as astronomers now define the word.
Picture
A false-color map shows the sky temperatures of the early universe, when atoms formed for the first time. The sky looks like a spherical globe above and all around us but the mapmakers have used an oval shape to include the part we could only see from the other side of the Earth.
People often use the same word for objects that specialists distinguish. When people see bright, compact sky objects they usually call them “stars,” but astronomers classify them as stars, planets, comets, and meteors. The warm spots soon after the beginning are yet another class in their terminology. We can show the photographs to modern children, and if we don’t prompt them, they are likely to call the spots stars. If we could show the photographs to people of previous millennia, they would probably call the spots “stars” in their own ancient language.

The objects astronomers call stars began to shine long after the light of the first morning faded, along with its warm spots. Yet we would be justified in calling the spots “the morning stars.” They appeared at the end of the first morning when atoms, the foundations of the Earth and everything else, had just formed for the first time.

While we wait for theoreticians to address the questions we mentioned previously about inflation and the causality discrepancy, we can appreciate an interesting point that will remain valid whatever the age of the first light turns out to be. There are enough spots to gather statistics on their properties. The diameters of the spots follow a distribution with several peaks and valleys, like a wave. Physicists have shown that the distribution arises because of acoustic resonance.[i] Resonance means that waves of certain wavelengths fit together and reinforce each other. When analyzing the diameters of the warm spots, they are talking about the resonance of sound waves inside a sphere.

After the nuclei formed in the first few minutes of the universe, there was a hot mixture of nuclei and electrons. The picture of the first light shows conditions as they were when the mixture cooled enough and the nuclei and electrons slowed enough to form atoms. At that time there was a harmonic sequence of resonant acoustic peaks[ii] in the distribution of spot diameters. Let’s remember the words “harmonic” and “acoustic” from the foregoing.

At present no sound can pass from one star to another. Sound must travel in a material medium, like air or water or rock. The stars we can see are isolated far away from each other in the hard vacuum of space. But at the beginning of the universe, things were different. The warm spots in the first light were immersed in a medium dense enough to carry sound waves.

Now we can make our point. The book of Job in the Bible presents a series of poetic discourses between Job and his three friends, with an extra discourse and God’s reply at the end. God says that the morning stars shone when He laid the foundations of the Earth.


[i] Schwarzschild, Bertram, “Cosmic Microwave Observations Yield More Evidence of Primordial Inflation,” Physics Today, 54 (Number 7, July 2001), pp. 16–18.

[ii] Bennett, Charles L., Michael S. Turner, Martin White, “The Cosmic Rosetta Stone,” Physics Today, 50 (Number 11, November 1997), pp. 32–38.
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  • Home
  • The First Three Days of the Earth
    • Reconciling Science and the Bible >
      • Precise Science Confirms the Bible
      • Moses Foresaw Three Discoveries >
        • First Discovery >
          • Mass and Weight of Energy
          • Transformations and Materialization
          • Different Kinds of Rays and Materialization in Empty Space
          • Was Energy the Source of Material
        • Second Discovery
        • Third Discovery >
          • The First Light
          • Separating Light from Darkness
        • Early Ideas about the Beginning
        • An Up-to-Date Ancient Cosmology
        • The Confirmation
        • A Challenging Question
      • Cycles of Darkness and Light >
        • Teaching Children
        • The Idea the Word “Day” Expresses >
          • A Day Not The First Day
          • Not Literal 24-Hour Days
        • How Long Did the First Three Days Last?
        • Earth Rotation and the First Two Days
        • The Duration of the First Day
        • The First Three Cycles of Darkness and Light
      • Was There a Beginning? >
        • An Uncreated Unchanging Universe
        • Evidence for a Beginning >
          • Elements in the Stars
          • Natural Radiation from Space
          • Stars Consume Their Fuel
        • Cosmology and Relativity
        • Instability Determinism Uncertainty, Predestination >
          • Instability
          • Stability and Determinism
          • Predestination Indeterminacy Uncertainty
        • Einstein Science and Philosophy
        • Predestination versus Timely Intervention
    • Simple Elements and Morning Stars >
      • First Evening Energy and Particles >
        • The Energy of Different Kinds of Rays
        • The Most Energetic Rays
        • Natural Particle Production >
          • Simulating the Process
          • Particles from Darkness
        • Darkness in the Bible >
          • Why Darkness Comes First
          • Isaiah on Darkness and Light
      • First Morning-Simple Elements >
        • Doppler Shift Expansion and Cooling >
          • The Beginning of Nucleosynthesis
          • Four Forces
          • Forces Present in Empty Space
        • Nucleosynthesis >
          • The First Elements
          • The First Halt in Nuclei Production
          • Insufficient Complexity
        • The First Light Was Good >
          • The Immediate Cause of the First Light
          • Forming the Light
          • The Confirmation of Darkness and Light
    • Stars that Formed Complex Elements >
      • Second Evening-Expansion >
        • The Expanding Universe >
          • The Giant Atom that Exploded
          • Expansion Not a Big Bang Explosion
          • Expansion Preserves Order
        • Expanding Now But Later What? >
          • Expanding but Uncreated
          • Continuous Creation
          • The Cyclic Version of Continuous Creation
        • The Expanding Universe Prevails
      • Second Morning-Heavy Elements >
        • Heat and Light Make Heavy Elements >
          • Differences in Stellar Composition
          • Nuclear Binding Energy
        • Energy from Fusion and Fission >
          • The Proton-Proton Reaction
          • Nuclear Stability
        • Different Kinds of Fission
        • Burning Helium and Heavier Elements
    • Forming the Sun and Earth >
      • Third Evening-A Dusty Yellow Star >
        • Supernovas Begin the Third Evening
        • Extraterrestrial Water
        • Lighting the Sun
        • The Carbon to Oxygen Reaction
        • The Darkness of the Third Evening
      • Third Morning-The Earth Forms >
        • The Search for a Planet Suitable for Life
    • How Does God Create? >
      • Conditions at the Very Beginning >
        • Creation from Nothing
        • Can We Create Energy? >
          • God Works to Create Energy
          • The Work Necessary to Create the Universe
        • Denial of Creation
        • The Simplest Explanation
        • Creation in a Singularity >
          • Can We Investigate the Instant of Creation?
          • The First Light Has Fluctuations
      • The Next Three Days >
        • Structure in the Genesis Narrative >
          • Examples of Parallelism
          • Parallel Structure in the Creation Narrative
        • Day Four >
          • Not All Stars Formed on the Fourth Day
          • When Did the Stars and Sun Start to Shine?
          • Signs for Animals and People
      • What Is the Origin of the Universe?
    • Appendices >
      • Appendix A
      • Appendix B
  • Design or Luck?
    • Creative Design >
      • Darwin and Adaptive Variation >
        • Finches and Form Adaptation
        • Adaptive Behavior and Structure
        • Intelligence and Autonomy
      • Biological Structure and Reproduction
      • Adaptive Form
      • Darwin and Darwinism >
        • The Development of the Sciences
        • Contrasting Darwinism and Thermodynamics
        • Darwinism Today
      • The Limits of Automatic Design
    • Why Are Not All Darwinists Rich? >
      • Automatic Design: Artificial and Natural >
        • The Automatic Lens-Design Program
        • Company Top Secret
        • Comparing Evolution and Lens Design
        • My Colleagues Reacted
      • Conclusion-Darwinism Does Not Work >
        • Can Design Be Automatic?
        • Darwinism and Automatic Design
      • How Far Can Small Steps Take Us? >
        • Small Improvements Are Merely Engineering
        • The Vastness of Hyperspace
        • Primordial Alphabet Soup >
          • Wide Coding Overcomes Noise
          • DNA is a Natural Language
          • Common Ancestry
          • Accepted Words Span the Space
        • Is Creative Design Consistent with Darwinism? >
          • Engineering Design
          • A Challenge for Darwinists
    • Thermodynamics >
      • Thermodynamics Information and Creation >
        • The First Law of Thermodynamics
        • The Second Law of Thermodynamics >
          • Entropy
          • Perpetual Motion
        • Information and Order >
          • Entropy Probability and Information
          • Multiplying Probability and Adding Entropy
          • Probability and Information
        • Structure Design Intelligence and Creativity >
          • Structure and Breakdown--Death and Decay
          • Perfection and Beauty
      • Earth-Sun Thermodynamics >
        • A Simple Example of a Thermodynamic Process
        • The Example Applied to the Sun and Earth
      • Another Error about Thermodynamics >
        • A Darwinist Argument about Thermodynamics
        • Sunlight and Earth Temperature
        • What Makes Sunlight Suitable?
      • The Night Sky Is Dark >
        • Olbers and his Paradox
        • A Black Forest and the Stars >
          • Seeing to the Far Limit of the Universe
          • The Limit of the Known Universe
          • Ordinary Darkness
      • A Planet Suitable for Life
      • The Thermodynamics of Life >
        • Living Organisms and Heat Engines >
          • The Thermodynamics of Life without Sunlight
        • Entropy Thermodynamics and Prigogine >
          • Darwinism and Thermodynamics
      • Thermodynamics and the Universe >
        • Formless and Dark but Energetic and Orderly >
          • Entropy and Penrose
        • Creative Agencies and Their Characteristics
    • Complex Order-Life-Intelligence >
      • Random Action and Complexity
      • Does Matter Organize Itself?
      • Complexity Can Be Specified
      • Information and Physical Laws
      • Did Our Life Begin Elsewhere?
      • Discovering Alien Life Will Change Nothing
      • Creative Design Suits the Universe for Life
    • The Quest Continues
  • Creationism that Scientists Can Accept
  • About
  • Contact
  • DVD
  • Booklet