Episode 12 starts covering Day 4 of Creation Week: We explore the wonderful and amazing star closest to earth. We find out how hot it gets, how far away it is, and how it protects us. Our cohosts today are 8 and 6 years old, just right for learning about how awesome God was giving us our source of physical heat and light.
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. Genesis 1:14-19
Sun Facts
There are lots of cool things to learn about the sun. I’ve collected a few of the best articles to read to find out more:
Universe Today: Interesting Facts About the Sun has a great picture of a solar eclipse at the top so you can see how perfectly we can view the corona. We also enjoyed learning about how different regions of the sun rotate at different speeds. Fascinating to think about!
Not mentioned in the podcast: This page and several more claim to know how old the sun is. They also tell us the sun is heating up, claiming it gets 10% brighter every billion years. If they are right about this, going back in time causes a big problem for evolution: the “faint sun paradox“.
A quick search creation.org session gave me those great links.
National Geographic: Sun. As you would expect, the visuals on this page are great. In fact, it has an interactive spinning sun with flares and spots to explore. It also mentions the Solar wind. A while back I wrote about Earth’s Force Fields that protect us from the solar wind and how that wind is actually protecting us from the rest of the universe.
NASA also has a short facts list page on the sun and a chart of its statistics in both metric and “English”
David Coppedge
We spent a few minutes learning about a second generation Creation Scientist from this month’s issue of Creation Ministries International Magazine.
David Coppedge is the guy who runs Creation Evolution Headlines that I mentioned in the last episode of the podcast. At the time I couldn’t find his name anywhere. Now I know whom to credit!
His story of being sold out to God and an active scientist for NASA is particularly exciting. You can also listen to Coppedge tell his story to Pastor Bob Enyart on Real Science Radio.
PS, want to find out more about the moon Io? Check it out HERE.
Sun Experiments
From NASA: No, we didn’t do anything this fancy, but it looks great!
We didn’t need a website to help us know how to trace the sun’s shadow across our sidewalk. It just took a stick poked in the grass and some sidewalk chalk.
I’d heard about using a basketball and pea to make a scale model of the sun’s distance from earth. Finding the exact distance to set them apart took some searching. I finally found a web page from someone at John Hopkin’s University that would give me the sizes and distances in feet. What was nice if you want to do this indoors is there are several scales mentioned, so you could start with the sun only being 3″ diameter if you need to.
For metric, a little more searching led me to the University of Manitoba. You just plug in how big you want your sun to be in millimeters and go from there! I translated our basketball to 30cm since that is close enough to get the point!
There really is no substitution for doing this yourself. Seeing how small the ball had gotten just going out to the orbit of the earth was eye opening. Realizing how far away Pluto is blows your mind!.
Bonus
There’s a website that gives you a taste for the vast amount of empty space in the Solar System. Starting with the moon at the scale of one pixel, joshworth.com has a sideways scrolling page you can spend a long time searching through. Especially after Mars things get rather boring! (He has some sayings assuming Naturalism as you scroll farther out.)
Very cool!
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In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. Psalm 19:4-6
