Creation Moment 7/19/2025 - When Atheists Dream On Company Time

"NASA Research Shows Path Toward Protocells on Titan (NASA, 14 July 2025). Reporter Aaron Gronstal is hallucinating. 

He envisions molecules magically coming together like leprechauns in the frozen wastes of Titan starting an epic journey toward life. “NASA research has shown that cell-like compartments called vesicles could form naturally in the lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan,” he teases, ramping up the perhapsimaybecouldness index far beyond the limits of scientific modesty. 

He knows better. 

Titan is all ice, with a surface -290° F, with polar lakes of hydrocarbons. Those lakes are as far from life as oil slicks are from birds dying on a polluted beach after an oil spill. Oh, he thinks, but maybe there could be life as we do not know it!

"Titan is the only world apart from Earth that is known to have liquid on its surface. However, Titan’s lakes and seas are not filled with

water. Instead, they contain liquid hydrocarbons like ethane and methane. On Earth, liquid water is thought to have been essential for the origin of life as we know it. Many astrobiologists have wondered whether Titan’s liquids could also provide an environment for the formation of the molecules required for life – either as we know it or perhaps as we don’t know it – to take hold there."

Aaron might shift the blame for this wandering wondering to the clueless atheists who recently published in the International Journal of Astrobiology dreaming on company time that “stable vesicles might form on Titan” that might represent a step toward what life needs someday over the rainbow. 

CEH

Creation Moment 5/18/2024 - The Delicate Dance around Saturn

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God.... Hebrews 11:3

"Planetary rings are also made up of billions of dead things, despite some evolutionists’ wild imaginations that life might be found in them. Such claims are pseudoscientific, not only because 

--there is no evidence for them, 

--and the necessary conditions do not exist there, 

--but also because there is not enough time for the magic of “chemical evolution” to have transpired.
*That such claims could be made in the media is more evidence that astrobiology (better dubbed bio-astrology) is pseudoscience.

Could alien life be hiding in the rings of Saturn or Jupiter? (Space.com, 7 May 2024). In his headline, reporter Jason Rao must have decided to lay out clickbait to catch the unwary, because even he knows that planetary rings are no place to be looking for life. Saturn’s rings meet two requirements, he claims: an energy source and organic matter. But there’s no water. ‘Two out of three ain’t bad,’ he thinks.

"Take the spectacular rings of Saturn. Within them, two of the three requirements for life as we know it are known to exist. Even out here, there is plenty of sunlight to feed life. And while Saturn’s rings might

seem an unlikely place for organic matter to exist, NASA’s Cassini mission found that carbon compounds like butane and propane rain into the gas giant’s atmosphere from its innermost D-ring.

Unfortunately, the third ingredient — liquid water — is missing. “You do have organic material falling into the rings, and there is sunlight, but there’s just no liquid water,” Matthew Tiscareno, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute in California, told Space.com. “There’s plenty of water, but it’s all frozen.”

Since the rings also contain some oxygen, maybe he should fire up his propane or butane torches to see what emerges out there in some imaginary Miller experiment.

*Tiscareno makes his living in the belief that chemical evolution of dead things led to the rise of advanced civilizations around the universe. 

But Rao’s suggestion is a bridge too far even for that evidence-free pseudoscience. Tiscareno must maintain a simulacrum of scientific decor for planetary “scientist” to appear on his resume. “I like the idea of thinking about creative places where life could be,” he dreams, which is what SETI scientists do all day long, whenever uncomfortable facts are not clouding their imaginations with fogma. Unfortunately for them, Christian chemist Dr James Tour from Rice University has already blown the fog away (8 Nov 2023), leaving ten of the leading chemical evolutionists looking like the sons of Sceva, naked and wounded.

Believers in ring life have another major hurdle: there is not enough time.
A new paper in Science Advances on May 10 casts new doubt on

rings lasting for billions of years. Authored by planetary ringmaster Jeff Cuzzi and colleagues, the paper examined data from the Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) instrument aboard the Cassini spacecraft. RSS performed occultations of the rings (i.e., viewing distant starlight leaking through the rings as the spacecraft moved). These experiments allowed scientists to assess the density of the rings, and also to calculate particle diameters. The data were particularly interesting for one of Saturn’s most tenuous rings, the F-ring, which orbits outside the main rings. This ring astonished scientists during the Voyager mission flybys in the early 1980s, because it was found to be comprised of several individual strands that appeared to be braided around each other!

Cassini disproved the “braiding” hypothesis; two “shepherd moons” on either side of the F-ring, named Prometheus and Pandora, 

were found to keep the ring particles confined in a delicate balance of forces, otherwise the particles would drift away into space. 

But Cassini did identify a number of separate strands in the F-ring along with “kinks” where density was higher. 

The RSS data also confirmed that most of the ring is composed of

particles with diameters in the microns—about as small as smoke particles. (This is also true of Jupiter’s faint rings, and in Saturn’s wispy G-ring, and the E-ring that is produced by the geysers at Enceladus.) 

There were, however, clusters of particles in the F-ring a thousand times larger: still tiny, but in the millimeter range. Having combined mass a thousand times higher, clusters of these larger particles pull the micron-sized particles toward them, but there’s a problem: the larger particles are not evenly distributed throughout the ring. They cluster into “ring arcs,” similar to those in Neptune’s Adams ring.

Q: How, then, can the small particles avoid escaping the F-ring over time?

Q: What happens when chaotic interactions occur? 

Since orbital conjunctions between Prometheus and specific F ring longitudes are phased to occur only when Prometheus is at its

periapse, furthest from the F ring and least likely to deliver a strong enough gravitational impulse to send the ring particles off onto chaotically diverging orbits, it seems likely that at apoapse (closest to the ring) the particles could become destabilized, careening out of the ring altogether. 

The authors mention the possibility of “unusually strong, chaos-inducing perturbations” when Prometheus is closer to the F-ring. They also mention that late in the Cassini mission (2013), “Prometheus had glitched to a new orbit” producing four anomalous measurements they chose to ignore.

Q: How often does that happen? Those are probably not rare: “Saturn system gravitational interactions and is also known to incur large, somewhat impulsive, jumps due to chaotic interactions with Pandora.”

An obvious question arises: 

Q: Has this delicate dance been going on for 4.5 billion years? 

The authors of the paper do not address that question with an estimated lifetime. They only say in the conclusion,

"Because Prometheus’ orbit does evolve chaotically by small increments (and we think we have seen one such event), the true core material must be able to adapt and track stable sites that move by small amounts now and then…. Perhaps an even more notable problem, which our theory does not resolve, is how these disconnected arcs manage to maintain a common, uniformly precessing, eccentric orbit."

Since deep-time believers hesitate to invoke special times at which phenomena like this are observable when humans happen to exist, it seems the burden is on them to explain how such delicate interactions can last for billions of years." 

CEH

Creation Moment 2/10/2024 - Mimas-mania

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. Genesis 2:1

"Mimas is a little icy moon outside of Saturn’s rings, just under 250 miles in diameter. Few are the astronomers who thought this little moon would have a subsurface ocean of liquid water – till today.

When the embargo was lifted on a paper in Nature, all the toadies in the Big Science Media raced to get their boilerplate to the internet, hoping to compete for clicks for their advertisers. 

This custom is rigged to popularize the consensus Darwin-materialist narrative. Since most science journalists are trained to treat “scientists” as true prophets and were trained in Darwin Indoctrination Centers (known as public schools), their duty is to write up the expert consensus as creatively as possible, not to question it. 

Reporters can ridicule politicians, but criticizing something a NASA scientist says would be way outside the rules of propriety for a science journalist. 

So here we go again, watching all quack in unison: “Mimas might have water! That means it might have life!”

Saturn’s ‘Death Star’ moon Mimas may have an ocean scientists never believed could exist (Space.com, 7 Feb 2024). Mimas is sometimes dubbed the “Death Star moon” because its large crater Herschel makes it resemble the Death Star from Star Wars I.

Reporter Robert Lea was sure to include all the astrobiological

talking points. “Astronomers have discovered that a tiny moon of Saturn, named Mimas, may harbor a hidden liquid ocean beneath its thick icy shell and may thus have the conditions for habitability.”

Water and rock interactions are thought to have played a vital role in the origins and continued existence of life on Earth, meaning such chemistry on Mimas is indeed an exciting prospect for investigations of life and habitability in the solar system."

We coined a term hydrobioscopy to refer to NASA’s persistent focus on water in the search for extraterrestrial life. Water may be a necessary condition for life, but it is not sufficient. Your body is 60% water. Should you therefore be called nothing more than a water balloon? 

If you find silicon, does that mean that computers might emerge from it? 

“Mimas is a small object that looks extremely cold, with no geologic activity, and you would never expect any geophysical activity inside like heating, or contact between water and with silicates in its rocky core,” Lainey said. “Finding this happening is really astonishing.“

Q: Has water been observed at Mimas? 

A: No. 

Q: Has life been found there? 

A: No. 

Conclusion: astrobiologists are easily astonished at their own imaginations." 

CEH

Creation Moment 1/23/2024 - Saturn's Titan's Methane

In the beginning God created the heaven..... Genesis 1:1

"Furthermore, solar radiation is eroding the methane space blanket. 

--When enough methane has been depleted, the atmosphere will

collapse, because the temperature will fall enough to condense out the nitrogen, carrying it and all the other ingredients down to the surface. Dr. Atreya put 100 million years as an upper limit on the sustainability of Titan’s atmosphere – only about one fiftieth of the assumed age of the solar system. 

He had no explanation for why Titan has such a dense atmosphere today, other than perhaps it formed recently by some unknown mechanism, and we are lucky to see it. 

--When the reporter remarked that such an answer sounded like the same one the ring scientists give for why we see Saturn’s rings (which are also very short lived), he agreed, with a grin of chagrin.

100 million years is the upper limit; it could be far less. Whenever you are told the earth and universe are billions of years old, don’t just swallow it: ask questions. 

That “the earth is 4.5 billion years old” is one of those truisms that everybody knows because the Discovery Channel says so, 

Q: but what is the evidence? 

Here is another case of a phenomenon that doesn’t fit. It’s not that scientists can’t find a way to fit anomalies into the timeline; the important lesson is that the timeline does not come from the data, but from the assumptions." 

CEH

Creation Moment 6/4/2023 - "E-ring" Problem for Long Age Chronology

Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; Hebrews 1:2

 

"Webb Telescope finds towering plume of water escaping from Saturn moon (Southwest Research Institute, 30 May 2023). “Two Southwest Research Institute scientists were part of a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team that observed a towering plume of water vapor more than 6,000 miles long — roughly the distance from the U.S. to Japan — spewing from the surface of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus.” The diameter of Enceladus is only about 300 miles, roughly the width of Arizona or Iowa.

Read some of the superlatives about this geyser plume by amazed scientists, like Christopher Glein at SwRI:

“In the years since NASA’s Cassini spacecraft first looked at Enceladus, we never cease to be amazed by what we find is happening on this extraordinary moon.”

Once again, the latest observations made with Webb’s Near InfraRed Spectrograph have yielded remarkable results.

“When I was looking at the data, at first, I was thinking I had to be wrong, it was just so shocking to map a plume more than 20 times the diameter of the moon,” said Geronimo Villanueva of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of the recent paper. “The plume extends far beyond what we could have imagined.”

The problem of how long this level of activity could persist is ignored by the scientists. As usual, they sidestep to speculate whether the presence of water ice indicates there could be life on the moon.

“Enceladus is one of the most dynamic objects in the solar system and is a prime target in humanity’s search for life beyond Earth,” said Glein, a leading expert in extraterrestrial oceanography….

Dr. Silvia Protopapa, an expert in the compositional analysis of icy bodies in the solar system who was also on the Cycle 1 team.  “This serves as a stunning testament to Webb’s extraordinary abilities. I’m thrilled to be part of the Cycle 2 team as we initiate our search for new indications of habitability and plume activity on Enceladus.” …

“We will search for specific indicators of habitability, such as organic signatures and hydrogen peroxide,” Glein said….

The new observations will provide the best remote opportunity to search for habitability indicators on the surface….

---And yet it is unthinkable that eruptive activity this vigorous could continue for billions of years. Enceladus spews out so much water and ice, it creates a huge ring around Saturn’s main rings, called the E-ring. The torus-shaped ring even affects Saturn’s powerful magnetic field.

Webb’s sensitivity reveals a new story about Enceladus and

how it feeds the water supply for the entire system of Saturn and its rings. As Enceladus whips around the gas giant in just 33 hours, the moon spews water, leaving a halo, almost like a donut, in its wake. The plume is not only huge, but the water spreads across Saturn’s dense E-ring. JWST data indicate that roughly 30 percent of the water stays in the moon’s wake, while the other 70 percent escapes to supply the rest of the Saturnian system.

James Webb telescope discovers gargantuan geyser on Saturn’s moon, blasting water hundreds of miles into space (Space.com, 30 May 2023). Does reporter Isobel Whitcomb discuss the dating problem with Enceladus?

This isn’t the first time scientists have seen Enceladus spout water, but the new telescope’s wider perspective and higher sensitivity showed that the jets of vapor shoot much farther into space than previously realized — many times deeper, in fact, than the width of Enceladus itself.

Then comes the hydrobioscopy in a big philosophical burp:

Analysis revealed that the jets contained methane, carbon

dioxide and ammonia — organic molecules containing chemical building blocks necessary for the development of life. It’s even possible that some of these gases were produced by life itself, burping out methane deep beneath the surface of Enceladus, an international team of researchers posited in research published last year in The Planetary Science Journal.

Water is another piece of evidence in the case for possible life on Enceladus. Enceladus is totally encrusted in a thick layer of water ice, but measurements of the moon’s rotation suggest that a vast ocean is hidden beneath that frozen crust. Scientists think the spurts of water sensed by JWST and Cassini come from hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor — a hypothesis supported by the presence of silica, a common ingredient in planetary crusts, in the vapor plumes.

---Neither press release even talks about whether this activity could last for thousands of years, let alone millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or 4.5 billion. 

---The JWST data exacerbates the problem. 

Q: Why do the scientists ignore the implications? 

---Enceladus must be young. 

Q: When, and why, did it start spewing out water recently, if Saturn is old?" 

CEH

Creation Moment 12/13/2022 - A Moon similar to Earth

God created a moon more similar to earth than our planets....interesting...more planetary diversity which points to DESIGN/CREATION which = CREATOR. Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; Hebrews 1:2

 "Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is the only moon in the Solar System with a dense atmosphere, and it is also the only planetary body other than Earth that currently has rivers, lakes, and seas.

In addition to a hazy mixture of nitrogen and hydrocarbons like methane and ethane, the atmosphere of this strangely Earth-like world also contains an array of more complex organic molecules."

SciNews

Creation Moment 9/21/2022 - Chrysalis Myth

Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.... Hebrews 1:2

"A catastrophic event could have created Saturn’s rings while the

dinosaurs were still roaming Earth.” 

Q: Well, it could have, but did it?

 

At Space.com on 15 Sept 2022, reporter Keith Cooper cheerfully echoed the latest idea coming from planetary science wizards at their computers. “Saturn’s rings might have formed 100 million years ago when one of its icy moons was ripped apart by the planet’s gravity.” But does might make right?

Reporters’ imaginations launched into metaphorical wonderland. 

Theorists have even given a name to this unseen moon: Chrysalis, suggestive of an abiotic transformation that made Saturn the beautiful planet it is today, its shimmering rings shining like the colorful wings of a butterfly hatched from a caterpillar.

The catchy story was hatched by Jack Wisdom from MIT. He used computer models to investigate why Saturn has a 26.7° tilt—unexpected in planetary cosmogony. Fortunately for humans, Saturn’s tilt allows us to view the rings from Earth in all their glory.

 

Leah Crane runs with the metaphor at New Scientist on 15 Sept 2022:

If the extra moon was destroyed, the debris left behind could have later become Saturn’s rings, leading the researchers to name this wrecked moon Chrysalis after the form a caterpillar takes as it transforms into a butterfly. “The butterfly is long dormant in this chrysalis phase and then it unveils itself and flaps its wings,” says Wisdom. “Similarly, this was just a small moon made of ice and then the rings suddenly emerged when it was ripped apart.”

Q: What is the justification for this supposition? 

 Nobody saw Chrysalis. 

   Nobody saw any moon rip apart. 

     Nobody was present in the age of dinosaurs. 

       We know dinosaurs from their bones, 

          but are the rings of Saturn evidence of Chrysalis?"

CEH

Creation Moment 2/23/2022 - The Missing "Follow Up" Question

Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.... Hebrews 1:2

 

"Disruption of Saturn’s ring particles by thermal stress (Hirata et al., Icarus 19 Feb 2022). Knowing that thermal stress is at work on our moon to disrupt boulders and grind them down to dust, these researchers considered whether that happens in Saturn’s rings.

Spacecraft and ground-based observations show that the

main rings of Saturn lack particles larger than 10 m. Tidal or collisional destruction of satellites/comets have been proposed as the origin of the main rings; however, Saturn’s tide alone cannot grind km-sized fragments into submeter-sized particles because of the high mechanical strength of water ice and rock. The question arises as to why such large particles are not left in the current ring. It is known that thermal stress induced by diurnal and seasonal temperature variations can cause weathering and fragmentation of boulders and contribute to dust and regolith production on the Moon and terrestrial planets, and then such thermal stress can break particles larger than a critical radius while cannot smaller than the critical radius. In this study, we examined the role of thermal stress acting on Saturn’s ring particles. We found that thermal stress can grind porous ring particles larger than 10–20 m, which explains the lack of particles larger than 10 m in Saturn’s ring. Also, fragmentation by thermal stress can be adoptable for the ε rings of Uranus.

The only solar system bodies with large boulders, they say further, are found in “geologically active provinces such as the tiger stripes of Enceladus, where boulders are supplied by recent geological activity.” 

---A follow-up question should be why bodies as small as Enceladus should be active after 4.5 billion Darwin Years. 

That question was not asked." CEH

Creation Moment 11/30/2021 - Bio-Astrology of Astrobiology

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God... Hebrews 11:3

"Planetary scientists revealed their bad habit of hydrobioscopy again this week. They reasoned, Saturn’s little moon Enceladus has water; it has methane; it could have life! Why is that their focus? Why are

they ignoring the implications of youth for this little moon? Why do they picture life as something that just happens where water is found?

Methane in the Plumes of Saturn’s Moon Enceladus: Possible Signs of Life? (University of Arizona). Writer Dan Stolte in the press office titillates readers with the L-word life in his suggestive headline. “A study published in Nature Astronomy concludes that known geochemical processes can’t explain the levels of methane measured by the Cassini spacecraft on Saturn’s icy moon.” If it can’t be explained abiotically, then there’s only one other conclusion. Maybe it’s alive! (hope, hope, hope).

“Obviously, we are not concluding that life exists in Enceladus’ ocean,” Ferrière said. “Rather, we wanted to understand how likely it would be that Enceladus’ hydrothermal vents could be habitable to Earthlike microorganisms. Very likely, the Cassini data tell us, according to our models.

And biological methanogenesis appears to be compatible with the data. In other words, we can’t discard the ‘life hypothesis’ as highly improbable. To reject the life hypothesis, we need more data from future missions,” he added.

In order to avoid charges of unscientific thinking, the scientists at U of Arizona clarify their wording. They say that life under Enceladus is “consistent” with the observations:

The authors applied new mathematical models that combine geochemistry and microbial ecology to analyze Cassini plume data and model the possible processes that would best explain the observations. They conclude that Cassini’s data are consistent either with microbial hydrothermal vent activity, or with processes that don’t involve life forms but are different from the ones known to occur on Earth.

Two models are consistent with the observed methane output: life, or non-life. The conclusion hinges on that word “likely.”

“It partly boils down to how probable we believe different hypotheses are to begin with,” he said. “For example, if we deem the probability of life in Enceladus to be extremely low, then such alternative abiotic mechanisms become much more likely, even if they are very alien compared to what we know here on Earth.”

While the epistemic modesty in that statement is commendable, Régis Ferrière (associate professor in the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) must surely be wishing for some evidence of “evolutionary biology” to show up. Astrobiology (better described as bio-astrology) remains a science without a subject. Ferrière ran some tests on biotic vs abiotic models (not using actual organisms), and concluded that the vents at Enceladus are “very likely” to be habitable to Earthlike organisms.

---But wait. It’s one thing to say that Earthlike microorganisms could live out there, if they were transported from Earth to Enceladus on spaceships and dropped off. 

---It’s something vastly different to think life emerged from nonliving substances under the miles-deep ice crust over the presumed ocean inside Enceladus. 

That, by all calculations done since the famous Wistar Institute symposium in 1966, is fantastically, outrageously, unthinkably improbable. It is so ridiculously improbable, the option should not even enter into any serious discussions ... So why even mention “life” at Enceladus when the only sane possibility is that it was created?

  ---Meanwhile, the same group continues to ignore the implications for youth at Enceladus. 

 

This team referred back to a 2017 paper in Science that measured the molecular hydrogen (H₂) output of the Enceladus geysers. That team had found that none of the expected mechanisms could last long enough for the assumed age of the solar system (4.5 billion years). To rescue their essential belief, they proposed “other options” that might produce H₂ long enough, but they completely ignored mass loss of the leading ingredient in the plumes: water ice! Enceladus is pumping out enough water to create an entire ring around Saturn. Has that gone on for 4.5 billion years?  

They strain at an H₂ gnat and swallow an H₂O camel." CEH

Creation Moment 9/30/2021 - Saturn Ring/Moon System

 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God... Hebrews 11:3

"A recent article in Sky & Telescope magazine explains why secular theorists have difficulty agreeing on the ages of Saturn’s moons. In the process, the article provides a reminder that Saturn’s rings are young. It also presents possible evidence that some of Saturn’s moons are also young. Most important, it highlights the fact that (incorrect) secular origins stories spanning alleged histories of billions of years are almost certain to contradict themselves.

The article begins by briefly describing two main arguments for Saturn’s rings being young: the cleanness and brightness of the rings, as well as the fact that the rings are being destroyed fairly quickly. 

However, as noted by David Coppedge, a former systems administrator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and a team leader on the Cassini spacecraft mission to Saturn, secular scientists are generally uncomfortable with young rings for Saturn, as young rings are apparently harder for them to explain. This “general sense of discomfort” is acknowledged in the Sky & Telescope article. If the rings are indeed young, theorists would likely try to explain it as the result of a collision, despite this being an unlikely event:

Yet the precipitating event [for the recent formation of Saturn’s rings]—a moon-sized collision—would have been so rare that many scientists remain uneasy with the idea of young rings. Even those in favor of a past collision acknowledge this, such as [astrophysicist] John Dubinsky (then at University of Toronto), who qualified such an event in a 2019 study as “perhaps unlikely, but not wildly so.”

Because secular theorists link the formation of Saturn’s rings to the formation or destruction of its moons, questions about the age of the rings tie in to questions about the ages of the moons. The article notes that one of Saturn’s mid-sized moons, Rhea, is receding away from Saturn ten times faster than previously thought. Likewise, Titan was found to have been receding from Saturn a hundred times faster than previously thought.

However, even if these moons would not have been destroyed, high recession rates still pose potential problems to secular theorists. For instance, secular attempts to explain Titan’s origin have traditionally placed the primordial moon very close to its current location. A high recession rate for Titan calls such origin stories into question:

Most prior work had predicted that moons like Titan, or Jupiter’s moon Callisto, were formed at an orbital distance similar to where we see them now [emphasis mine]… This implies that the Saturnian moon system, and potentially its rings, have formed and evolved much more dynamically than previously believed.

Moreover, effects called tidal interactions should theoretically have caused the moons Tethys and Dione to have entered a state called “stable resonance” about 100 million years ago, in which Dione orbits Saturn three times for every two orbits of Tethys. This would have also caused greater tilts in their rotation axes. Yet these effects have not been observed.

Tidal effects should theoretically make noticeable changes in planet-moon systems over very long timescales. For instance, the fact that our moon experiences ‘synchronous rotation,’ with one side always facing the Earth, can be seen as a problem for recent creation, if one assumes that the moon did not start out in such a state. However, in this case, tidal interactions among Saturn and its moons are causing problems for the old-universe view!

If the 4.6-billion-year-long secular history for the solar system is fictitious, as creationists argue, then one would expect, as our knowledge of the solar system increases, more and more internal contradictions in the secular story to come to light. This is especially true for dynamic, moving systems, like Saturn and its more than fifty moons. Astronomer Matija Ćuk, who favors relatively young ages for Saturn’s moons, made an excellent point when he said, “Every time you add motion to the system, it makes old moons harder to have.” That Saturn’s moving moons present difficulties for the secular “billions of years” story should not surprise anyone, since the Lord actually made Saturn and its moons just a few thousand years ago." ICR

Creation Moment 8/20/2021 - Maybe Saturn was Made Fuzzy for a Reason?

"Astronomers using data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on ripples in Saturn’s rings have revealed new information about the gas giant’s mysterious core. Their results, published in the journal

Nature Astronomy, suggest that Saturn’s core is not a hard ball ofrock, as some previous theories had proposed, but a diffuse soup of ice, rock, and metallic fluids — a so-called ‘fuzzy’ core. They also reveal that the core extends across 60% of the planet’s diameter, which makes it substantially larger than previously estimated.

“Saturn is always quaking, but it’s subtle,” Dr. Mankovich said. ...“The planet’s surface moves about a meter every one to two hours like a slowly rippling lake.”

“The fuzzy cores are like a sludge,” Dr. Mankovich said. “The hydrogen and helium gas in the planet gradually mix with more and more ice and rock as you move toward the planet’s center.” “It’s a bit like parts of Earth’s oceans where the saltiness increases as you get to deeper and deeper levels, creating a stable configuration.”

“In order for the planet’s gravitational field to be oscillating with these particular frequencies, the interior must be stable, and that’s only possible if the fraction of ice and rock gradually increases as you go in toward the planet’s center,” Dr. Fuller said.

 They also pose challenges to current models of gas giant formation, which hold that rocky cores form first and then attract large envelopes of gas." SciNews

Q: How about this "Model"?----- Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God... Hebrews 11:3

Creation Moment 5/31/2021 - Titan’s South Belet Region Regolith

By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. Psalm 33:6

"Geomorphological map of the South Belet Region of Titan (Icarus). This paper describes varieties of terrain on Saturn’s largest moon,

Titan, focusing on the South Belet Region that stretches “from longitude 60°E to 120°E and from latitude 60°S to 0°, encompassing both equatorial and southern mid-latitude regions.” The last bullet point says, “Only one crater has been identified with confidence.” Over billions of years, this massive moon should have the most craters, but it does not. Why?

They make up a story that buries the evidence: “Complete burial of craters, especially in and around the Belet Sand Sea, may explain the dramatic lack of craters in this region.” They can’t even find secondary craters with confidence. “The general lack of a large primary impactor is likewise problematic.” They offer five possibilities for what might have buried the craters. Perhaps some crescent-shaped features are scars of impacts, they suggest. Whatever happened, their explanation is a story requiring evidence, not founded on evidence.

Regardless of origin, the preponderance of pseudo-circular features, whether as pits or crescents, on the surface of Titan suggest a complex erosional process that necessitates a more developed understanding of atmosphere/surface interactions, of the role of fluids in Titan’s icy substrate and organic regolith, ....

— They also admit, “Evidence for impact processes have also been identified, but their relative scarcity attest to a geologically young surface.” Bingo. That’s the science. They refer to earlier papers saying the same thing going back to 2007 when Cassini took its first images of Titan. Scientists were baffled then; they are baffled now." CEH

Creation Moment 12/21/2020 - Salt Water of Enceladus

Q: Shouldn't a planetary body this size be out of salt water by now IF it were hundreds of millions or billions of years old?
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God. Hebrews 1:3

".....researchers have discovered that the ice on Saturn’s moon Enceladus is fresh and regenerates, providing new insights into processes in our solar system.

Just a small shift in wavelength, from optical to infrared, reveals an astounding sight on the moon; glistening, fresh ice caps, which contrast with the pockmarked and scarred surface, riddled with chasms, gorges and other geographic blemishes. 

Cassini previously discovered plumes of salt water shooting out of four parallel gorges on the moon’s south pole, known as the ‘tiger stripes.’

As Enceladus orbits around Saturn, the planet’s tidal forces pull and stretch the moon, creating a variety of fissures, cracks and assorted canyons and gorges, while also producing geothermal heat which spews forth from the south pole in the form of heated water vapor.

This vapor, in turn, freezes in the atmosphere and forms the fresh sheets of ice across the surface, creating this persistent resurfacing effect.

Crystalline ice is rarely found in the cold, inhospitable wilderness of space, as it requires warmer temperatures than you’d find beyond Earth; a relatively warm ~110 Kelvin (-163 Celsius, -261 Fahrenheit). At these temperatures, water molecules retain enough energy to keep a crystalline form rather than an amorphous blob of ice which is what we usually find in space, thanks to more extreme cold temperatures.

Furthermore, the spectral signature of crystalline ice was found across the globe, not just in the regions near the so-called ‘tiger stripe’ geysers at the south pole, indicating that the process is ongoing and somewhat predictable." NW

Creation Moment 11/2/2020 - More Planetary Uniqueness [cyclopropenylidene]

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God... Hebrews 11:3

 

"NASA scientists identified a molecule in Titan’s atmosphere that has never been detected in any other atmosphere. In fact, many chemists have probably barely heard of it or know how to pronounce it: cyclopropenylidene, or C₃H₂. 

 “When I realized I was looking at cyclopropenylidene, my first thought was, ‘Well, this is really unexpected,’” said Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Astronomers have so far found C₃H₂ only in clouds of gas and dust that float between star systems — in other words, regions too cold and diffuse to facilitate many chemical reactions.

 

But dense atmospheres like Titan’s are hives of chemical activity. 

That’s a major reason scientists are interested in this moon, which is the destination of NASA’s forthcoming Dragonfly mission. Nixon’s team was able to identify small amounts of C₃H₂ at Titan likely because they were looking in the upper layers of the moon’s atmosphere, where there are fewer other gases for C₃H₂ to interact with. Scientists don’t yet know why cyclopropenylidene would show up in Titan’s atmosphere but no other atmosphere. “Titan is unique in our solar system,” Nixon said. “It has proved to be a treasure trove of new molecules.” 

The largest of Saturn’s 62 moons, Titan is an intriguing world that’s in some ways the most similar one to Earth we have found. Unlike any other moon in the solar system — there are more than 200 — Titan has a thick atmosphere that’s four times denser than Earth’s, plus clouds, rain, lakes and rivers, and even a subsurface ocean of salty water.

SciTechDaily

Creation Moment 7/2/2020 - Titan's Movement says....

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God...
Hebrews 11:3

"A recent news release from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announces that new examination of the data from the late Cassini spacecraft indicates that Saturn’s moon Titan is moving away from the planet at a higher rate than previously thought.

What are the implications of the fact that the moon is moving away?

Scientists thought they knew the rate at which the giant moon Titan is moving away from Saturn, but they recently made a surprising discovery: Using data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, they found Titan drifting a hundred times faster than previously understood – about 4 inches per year.

The article goes on to comment about the apparent age of the moon Titan (and the rest of the 80 moons). What can be determined (or at least inferred) by this movement?  The article states that this has caused questions about the age of the moons. The article states some basics:

The findings may help address an age-old question. While scientists know that Saturn formed 4.6 billion years ago in

the early days of the solar system, there’s more uncertainty about when the planet’s rings and its system of more than 80 moons formed. Titan is currently 759,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Saturn. The revised rate of its drift suggests that the moon started out much closer to Saturn, which would mean the whole system expanded more quickly than previously believed.

First, the statement is made that “scientists know that Saturn formed 4.6 billion years ago.”
They know? Really? Based on what real information do they know?
However, the point is what does it suggest, knowing that Titan is moving away from Saturn at a certain rate?

Titan moves outward at four inches a year. It seems hardly a significant amount, considering that Titan is presently 759,000 miles away from its host planet.

However, let’s look at these four inches on a cosmic time scale.
Four inches a year is 0.0063 miles a century. That computes to 6,300 miles each million years. In 100 million years, assuming the drift rate stayed at the present rate, the movement would be 630,000 miles, which would place the moon pretty close to Saturn. 
And 100 million years is miniscule compared to the claimed age of Saturn of 4.6 billion years.

So, this calls into question again – about the age of the universe and all that is within it. 
If Titan and Saturn were created at the same time as the earth, Titan sure would not have moved much since that event. And the way they were created would result in the slow drift apart."
CEH