Creation Moment 3/16/2019 - Image of God or Image of Stars?

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:

Genesis 1:26

"Elements heavier than iron form in supernova explosions.

End of story.

We can all rest now.

But wait…

 

The origin of heavy elements via supernovas is one of those facts everybody learns without question. Astronomers say so in

textbooks, on TV and in science media without any qualification, like “scientists believe” or “scientists think” it is so.

It led Carl Sagan and many of his disciples to quote, “We are made of starstuff.” Stuff happens, and this stuff exploded out of stars. Some of the stuff you might want to gather though; it includes gold and platinum.

Speaking of gold and platinum, some Japanese scientists have been investigating the origin of heavy elements like gold, platinum and everything else heavier than iron (atomic number 26).

Astrophysicists have been able to explain the lighter elements within traditional stellar fusion theory, because those reactions are exothermic.
The heavy elements, though, require endothermic reactions, and the only known source for that much energy is a supernova. Beyond that, few people realize the degree of uncertainty involved. A report from Japan’s National Institutes of Natural Sciences reproduced on Science Daily lets readers in on some dirty little secrets.

It is not yet identified where and how elements heavier than iron in the universe have been made. Drawing attention as one of the origins of the heavy elements is a merger of two neutron stars. In August 2017, gravitational waves caused by the merger of two neutron stars 130 million years ago were detected. At the same time, emission of the light called kilonova was also observed. The light of a kilonova comes from the material released by the merger of the neutron stars, and it is believed that the material contains abundant heavy elements, including precious metals such as gold and platinum, and rare earth metals such as neodymium.

A kilonova is a particular kind of massive supernova involving the collision of two neutron stars. With a lot of careful filtering of spectral noise, these scientists believe they identified absorption signatures of three ionized forms of neodymium in the debris cloud from the kilonova. That represents only one step in a difficult challenge of establishing whether all the heavy elements can be explained this way.

High precision computation of multiple-electron atoms is challenging due to difficulties in accounting for subtle correlations among electrons. In quantum mechanics, the correlation effects are represented by coherent superposition of different arrangements of constituent electrons. A virtually infinite number of arrangements are possible. The research team tested different sets of arrangements as to provide high accuracy data in realistic computation times, and succeeded in finding the optimal set of arrangements for each neodymium ion. Computed energies of constituent electrons agree with NIST’s world standard data within approximately 10% error in average, which is a much higher accuracy than has ever been achieved by the research team, and provide millions of wavelengths and probabilities for light absorption. An astronomer in the team, Masaomi Tanaka, Associate Professor at Tohoku University simulated the light of kilonovae using both the data with the highest precision and the data with a poor accuracy. The influence of the difference in precision on the brightness of the light is evaluated quantitatively for the first time to be approximately 20% at most. This value is sufficiently small to increase confidence in analysis of the light of kilonovae. Thus, the results of this research will accelerate research to elucidate the origins of precious metals such as gold and platinum in our universe by using the atomic data of highest precision.

In many areas of science, confident assertions rest on challenging measurements that have to be taken by fallible humans. Doing the

best they can, they come up with probabilities and likelihoods that are far less confident than the assertions made by popularizers. A 20% error is not very good, and that was just for one element. What about the other 66 naturally occurring elements?

...materialists are so eager to paint a broad-brush picture of big-bang-to-man, they sweep the uncertainties under the rug. (The big bang, you realize, only could have created hydrogen, helium, and a little bit of lithium, so everything else had to come from somewhere.)

Another issue we should consider is how those heavy elements got to the earth, and how they became accessible on the surface where humans could use them. We find pretty large deposits of gold in places, and platinum, and copper, and so-called “rare earth elements” that we use in our cell phones, jewelry and machinery. Our bodies need about 28 elements, including iron and heavier elements. How many supernovas had to occur in our stellar neighborhood to supply Earth with its observed values, and how did the elements get swept up into the one planet that has people who could benefit from them?"

CEH