"You can’t declare something old just because your worldview requires it to be old.New Scientist declared in bold print, “Distant dwarf planet near Pluto has a ring that no one expected.”
Reporter Ken Croswell, however, never explains why it was unexpected to find a prominent ring around the dwarf planet Haumea, located about 2 billion miles beyond the orbit of Pluto. When surprised by something that shouldn’t last for billions of years around a body smaller than Pluto, one strategy astronomers employ is to look excited:
- “This is a landmark discovery,” says Alan Stern at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “It’s very exciting.”
- “It was really an amazing surprise,” says Santos-Sanz.
- “This is fabulous. It’s a really great discovery,” says William McKinnon at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.
Nature News & Views explains why even Saturn’s rings remain an age-old problem:
A key factor in differentiating between these possibilities is the age of Saturn’s rings, but this is difficult to determine. The timescale for creating such massive rings, and the lack of dust, suggest an age of billions of years. However, the rings’ brightness, which is expected to lessen over time, points to a relatively young age .....If Saturn’s rings remain “enigmatic” after centuries of study, how much more surprising is it to find a little world with far less gravity holding on to a ring of particles!" CEH
He taketh the wise in their own craftiness:
Job 5:13
