As you may know from textbooks or my previous writings, the universe is filled with objects pouring out deadly radiation. A few examples include cataclysmic variable stars, novae, supernovae, pulsars, supernova remnants, black holes, and gamma-ray bursts. You’ve heard that various asteroids may be on a collision course with planet Earth. Now, a team of 52 astronomers from ten nations led by Matt Nicholl of Queens University, Belfast, has discovered yet another risk to advanced life—“extremely luminous, fast-cooling transients,” or, for the purposes of this article, ELFCTs.² (Astronomers have yet to come up with an official name for these newly discovered deadly objects/events.)  

While using the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert Survey (ATLAS), Nicholl’s team detected three of these “transient” phenomena. ATLAS, unlike most supernova survey telescopes, is specially designed to detect rapidly evolving astronomical phenomena on time scales of days, as compared to weeks or months. The three events they observed occurred in massive elliptical galaxies where star formation ceased long ago, “passive” galaxies. In terms of spatial orientation, these events occurred between 13,000 and 32,000 light-years out from the center of their galaxies. 

For the three events, the peak optical-wavelength luminosity rose to 16 times brighter than the peak luminosity of a Type Ia supernova (the optically brightest stellar objects previously observed), and yet their radio and x-ray emission levels were undetectable. Their brightness rose from undetectable to peak luminosity in a mere 9 days, and then faded by a factor of 6 within 15 days.

Not Supernovae
At first glance, these events appeared to be a new category of supernovae. However, the team of 52 astronomers quickly ruled out this possibility. First, they noted that no conceivable supernova model would explain the rapid rise and fall in optical luminosity astronomers observed for these events. Second, no conceivable supernova model would explain the lack of detectable radio and x-ray radiation from these events.

Additionally, Type Ia supernovae exhibit consistent, uniform peak luminosities; consistent, uniform rise and fade times; and consistent, uniform spectral distributions in their radiation outputs. The observed features for all three events fail, by far, to match any of these features.

As noted, the host galaxies for the three events are all passive. They ceased star formation several hundred million or even billions of years prior to the lookback time—the time it took the light from the galaxies in which the three events occurred to reach astronomers’ telescopes. Stars massive enough to become supernovae undergo star formation, nuclear burning, and a supernova eruption all in less than a few million years.

Black Hole Encounter
The team went on to consider and analyze six other possible explanations for the ELFCTs they had observed. Their work demonstrated that the only viable explanation would be a close gravitational encounter (or merger) between a relatively low-mass star with either a stellar-mass black hole (having a mass equal to a few times as large as our star, the Sun) or an intermediate-mass black hole (several hundred to several thousand times the Sun’s mass). 

Intermediate-mass black holes have been found to reside, typically, at the core of globular clusters (see figure 1).³ Gravity-wave telescopes have detected the existence of stellar-mass black holes as well.⁴ The team concluded that the three ELFCTs they observed could best be explained as encounters between low-mass stars and stellar-mass black holes. 

Figure 1: M2, a Globular Cluster 37,000 Light-Years Away
M2 contains over 150,000 stars. Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Space Telescope/STScI   

Further, the team provided a tentative estimate of the frequency with which ELFCT events are likely to occur within the universe. That figure: one such event per cubic gigaparsec per year. (A gigaparsec = 3.26 million light-years.) This occurrence rate is about 100,000 times lower than the supernova core collapse rate. The team closed their paper with a reminder that all conclusions drawn from their discovery must be acknowledged as tentative. They emphasized the need for future observations and survey programs to elucidate both the nature and occurrence of ELFCTs. Nevertheless, even their initial observations make clear that extremely luminous, fast-cooling transient events will occur almost exclusively in star clusters and galaxies where both the density and number of stars is high, more specifically, in large, dense globular clusters and in large, dense elliptical/spherical galaxies (see figure 2).

Figure 2: ESO 325-G004, an Elliptical Galaxy 450 Million Light-Years Away 
ESO 325-G004 contains several thousand globular clusters. Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA   

Design Significance
Based on the team’s assessment of their remarkable discovery, Earth resides in a location well protected from the dangers of ELFCTs. The Milky Way Galaxy (MWG) has the lowest known ratio of stellar mass to total mass of any known large spiral galaxy. Its stellar mass to total mass ratio is only half that of the Andromeda Galaxy’s. Our galaxy also has a low number of globular clusters as compared with other large galaxies, a total of just 152 compared to several thousand. 

Our solar system resides 26,000 light-years distant from the galactic center, where stellar density is highest. In other words, our solar system exists in what’s considered an “under-dense” region of the MWG. So, in the context of ELFCT risk, Earth appears to reside in the safest location within the safest galaxy in which advanced life can conceivably exist. 

In fact, the MWG belongs to a galaxy group where no giant galaxies or large spheroidal/ellipsoidal galaxies exist. The galaxy groups in the vicinity of the MWG’s group are all relatively small and devoid of giant galaxies. The nearest galaxy clusters are the Virgo, Centaurus, Hydra, Pavo, and Fornax clusters. Of these clusters, only the Virgo and Centaurus contain more than a few giant ellipsoidal/spheroidal galaxies. Given that the giant ellipsoidal/spheroidal galaxies in the Virgo and Centaurus clusters are more than 50 million light-years away, they present little, if any, ELFCT risk to advanced life on Earth. 

The discovery of ELFCTs represents one more factor limiting the possible existence of advanced life in other regions of the universe beyond Earth. Provision of a safe space amid the countless dangers identified by astrophysicists, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, suggests to me the careful planning of a purposeful, personal Creator, more specifically, the God of the Bible.

Endnotes

1. “Neil deGrasse Tyson (caught on camera): The Universe Is Trying to Kill You,” interview outtake, Big Think Mentor (June 27, 2013), bigthink.com/big-think-mentor/neil-deGrasse-Tyson-caught-on-camera-the-universe-is-trying-to-kill-you.
2. M. Nicholl et al., “AT 2022aedm and a New Class of Luminous, Fast-Cooling Transients in Elliptical Galaxies,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 954, no. 1 (September 1, 2023): L28, doi:10.3847/2041-8213/acf0ba.
3. Manuel Arca Sedda et al., “The DRAGON-II Simulations – II. Formation Mechanisms, Mass, and Spin of Intermediate-Mass Black Holes in Star Clusters with Up to 1 Million Stars,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 526, no. 1 (November 2023): 429–442, doi:10.1093/mnras/stad2292.
4. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the Virgo Collaboration, and the KAGRA Collaboration, “GETC-3: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the Second Part of the Third Observing Run,” to be published in Physical Review X (October 23, 2023), arXiv:2111.03606.

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To help readers who are not astrophysicists to appreciate this discovery, let me provide some background. 

Cosmic Dawn
Astronomers refer to one of the most crucially important epochs in the universe’s history as the cosmic dawn. It’s the time when the first stars form and their nuclear furnaces ignite so that they shine. In this early moment, the universe transitions from ubiquitous darkness to pervasive brightness. 

The JWST’s primary long-term mission is to explore and determine the nature of this cosmic dawn. Specifically, astronomers want to know how massive and numerous these first-born stars were and how they affected the formation of the universe’s first galaxies and black holes. Different big bang creation models predict different populations and mass ranges of such stars (called Population III stars).

Challenge of Seeing the Very First Stars
Astronomers have long known that not all stars form at the same rate. The greater the mass and density of a gas cloud, the faster that cloud will collapse and produce a protostar (young star that is still gathering and compressing the mass needed to ignite nuclear fusion). The greater the mass of the protostar, the faster the nuclear fusion in its core (the fusion of hydrogen into helium) will ignite to make it a stable, bright, shining star.

The shortest time in which a gas cloud can produce a protostar is about 1 million years.³ The longest it may take is about 10 million years. Table 1 lists the time required for protostars of different masses to transition from first becoming protostars to igniting the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in their cores.⁴ Knowing these times helps astronomers gain a more accurate picture of the universe’s early history.

Table 1: Time Durations for Protostars to Become Nuclear-Burning Stars

Star mass at nuclear ignition time               Time until nuclear-burning ignition

Table 2 lists the time required for stars to complete their nuclear burning cycle from start to finish and become supernovae. In a supernova event, a star blasts most of its nuclear-burning products into interstellar space. Stars that end their nuclear burning with masses more than 1.4 times the Sun’s mass will undergo a supernova eruption.⁵ Only stars that begin their nuclear burning with a mass greater than or equal to about 10 times the Sun’s mass will end their nuclear burning with this much mass. The duration of a star’s nuclear burning cycle is inversely proportional to the 2.5 power (~M^-2.5) to its mass at the time nuclear burning ignites.  

Table 2: Times for Stars to Complete Their Nuclear Burning and Become Supernovae

Star mass at nuclear ignition time     Time from nuclear ignition until supernova

As Tables 1 and 2 show, the most massive Population III stars in the universe burn through their nuclear fuel and explode as supernovae in 18,000 years or less (table 2) before the least massive Population III stars even begin their nuclear burning in 1 billion years (table 1). In fact, the most massive Population III stars will go through their entire nuclear-burning cycle before the least massive ones completely form as protostars from within the universe’s first gas clouds.

The dramatic difference in star formation time means that all the universe’s low-mass Population III stars will inevitably be polluted by the ashes from the high-mass Population III stars well before nuclear burning even ignites in these low-mass stars. This difference means that only the highest-mass Population III stars will be free of chemical pollution from supernova eruption events.   

Pristine Population III Stars
All big bang models predict that the universe begins with just one element in the periodic table: hydrogen. At the cosmic creation event, the universe is nearly infinitely hot. As the universe expands, it cools. One of the strongest verifications of big bang cosmology is the 12 billion-year cooling curve astronomers have observed and measured. It perfectly matches what the big bang models predict.⁶  

During the first few minutes after the cosmic beginning, the universe spends about 20 seconds in the 14–150 billion Kelvin temperature window, where nuclear fusion is able to take place. Within these 20 seconds, about 24% of the universe’s primordial hydrogen is fused into helium, along with a trace amount of lithium.

Big bang models thus predict that the very first stars to form will be composed of only these three elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. All other elements will arise from the nuclear furnaces of stars, from supernovae, and from neutron star mergers.⁷

The challenge for astronomers has been that only the most massive Population III stars will have avoided being polluted by the ashes of supernovae. These extremely massive stars shine brightly for only a few tens of thousands of years. This rapid burn-up means that astronomers will only be able to image them at look-back times corresponding to the very early cosmic epoch when conditions first permit star formation to occur: the cosmic dawn. In other words, astronomers will need to search for these stars at distances of about 13.6 billion light-years—close to the earliest moments of the universe’s 13.8 billion-year history.

Not even the JWST possesses the power to image individual stars at distances of 13.6 billion light-years. The best that astronomers can hope for is to image a large dense cluster of stars at this distance. However, given how rapidly the most massive stars form, burn, and explode, such a star cluster is bound to be at least partly polluted by the earliest-forming stars, making the detection of stars comprised of only hydrogen, helium, and a trace amount of lithium extremely difficult.   

Nearly Pristine Population III Stars
The fact that stars composed of only hydrogen, helium, and a trace amount of lithium are observationally out of reach does not mean, however, that astronomers have no hope of establishing that such stars existed in the early universe. This important prediction of big bang cosmology can be verified by the discovery of low-mass Population III stars that have been polluted (infused with elements) exclusively by the residue of stars that started their nuclear burning with only hydrogen, helium, lithium, and no other elements.

These low-mass Population III stars remain bright for billions of years. Therefore, astronomers need not look back as far as 13.6 billion years (or the equivalent distance) to see them.     

To date, astronomers have discovered some low-mass Population III stars in the outer halo of our Milky Way Galaxy (MWG).⁸ As described in my book, Designed to the Core, our MWG is extraordinary in that its outer halo has an extremely low density of stars,⁹ with an especially sharp drop-off in density beyond 90,000 light-years from the MWG center. Astronomers have also determined that these outskirt stars have remained dynamically undisturbed for the past 11 billion years.¹⁰ Because of the unique features of the MWG’s outer halo, a few of the universe’s Population III stars still exist there and have not been polluted by later-forming stars (called Population II, which form entirely from the ashes of exploded Population III stars, and Population I stars, which form predominantly from the ashes of exploded Population II stars). They’ve been polluted only by the ashes of other Population III stars. 

The spectral signatures (measures of atmospheric composition) of these stars show that they possess extremely low quantities of elements heavier than lithium, quantities lower by orders of magnitude (factors of hundreds of times) than the least polluted Population II stars. Thus, there is no mistaking that they are Population III stars.

Breakthrough: Metal-Free Population III Stars
Astronomers would still hope to find direct evidence of “metal-free” Population III stars, stars manifesting huge amounts of hydrogen and helium and no measurable quantity of elements heavier than lithium (in astronomers’ terms,“metals”). 

Thanks to the JWST, such direct evidence of metal-free Population III stars may now be in hand. A mission known as JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) is a quest by dozens of astronomers from all over the world to image the cosmic dawn in far greater detail and depth than the Hubble Space Telescope made possible.

In a paper already submitted to and still undergoing peer review at Astronomy & Astrophysics, 36 astronomers led by Roberto Maiolino used the JWST to study, spectroscopically, the halo of the galaxy GN-z11 (see figure 1). GN-z11 is an exceptionally luminous galaxy, ranked as the brightest known galaxy in the first half billion years of cosmic history.¹¹ GN-z11 has a light-travel distance of 13.35 billion light-years, which tells us that we are seeing it as it was just 440 million years after the big bang origin event.

Figure 1: Hubble Space Telescope Image of GN-z11
Credit: NASA/ESA        

GN-z11 has 1% of the mass and about 5% of the size of the MWG, and yet it’s one of the largest galaxies in the very early universe. GN-z11’s total stellar mass is about a billion times the Sun’s mass and its stars have an average age of only 40 million years (young, in astronomical terms).¹²

Maiolino and his colleagues detected the HeIIl1640 emission line in the halo of GN-z11. They then went on to show that the unusual width of this spectral line, as well as the absence of metal spectral lines, is best explained by the presence of extremely massive Population III stars. These stars—with masses ranging from 100 to 500 times (or greater) the mass of the Sun—would have effectively photoionized all the gas in GN-z11’s halo. The team’s data simultaneously ruled out Population II stars or GN-z11’s active galactic nucleus as possible source(s) of the observed photoionization. 

The existence of metal-free stars in GN-z11 with masses in the 100–500+ range, measured by Maiolino and his colleagues, helps explain GN-z11’s exceptionally high mass and size. This discovery yields the most direct and definitive evidence to date for the existence of the mass range of Population III stars predicted by virtually all big bang models. It provides the clearest picture to date of the cosmic dawn. 

A Bright Way Forward
It’s a momentous discovery, but it must be confirmed and more solidly established. As Maiolino’s team notes, astronomers will need the JWST to take deeper images of GN-z11 and other distant galaxies like it. (In an upcoming post, I’ll describe a new tool that astronomers plan to use to explore the cosmic dawn—a low-cost telescope to be placed on the Moon’s far side with the capacity to detect wavelengths of light never before seen by astronomers.) Already, however, this research has shown the astronomical community and the wider world the value of the JWST in providing fresh insights into the cosmic dawn. 

As astronomers gain further understanding of the numbers and mass distribution of the earliest stars, they’ll be able to build better models for the formation and development of the universe’s first galaxies. This bottom-up approach will be complemented, potentially, by a top-down strategy, which entails using the JWST to gather data on the universe’s first galaxies and how they formed.

One major benefit of this latest discovery is this: as astronomers learn more about the cosmic dawn, their insights will reveal which of several big bang creation models provides the most accurate description of the origin and history of the universe. I’m confident that a more detailed and precisely defined big bang model will yield yet more evidence that what the Bible declared thousands of years ago about the origin and the history of the universe is, in fact, true. Thus, it will strengthen the case for the divine inspiration and accuracy of the Bible, giving people around the world more reasons to believe in the One who created the universe and inspired the Scriptures.

Endnotes

1. Roberto Maiolino et al., “JADES: Possible Population III Signatures at z = 10.6 in the Halo of GN-z11,” arXiv:2306.00953v2 (June 6, 2023), submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics.
2. Hugh Ross, “What Does the Bible Say about the Big Bang?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, February 6, 2023.
3. Richard B. Larson, “The Physics of Star Formation,” Reports on Progress in Physics 66 (September 10, 2003): 1651–1697, doi:10.1088/0034-4885/66/r03.
4. Masanobu Kunitomo et al, “Revisiting the Pre-Main-Sequence Evolution of Stars: I. Importance of Accretion Efficiency and Deuterium Abundance,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 599 (March 2017): id. A49, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201628260; I.-Juliana Sackmann, Arnold I. Boothroyd, and Kathleen E. Kraemer, “Our Sun. III. Present and Future,” Astrophysical Journal 418 (November 20, 1993): 457–468, doi:10.1086/173407; Rudolf Kippenhahn and Alfred Weigert, Stellar Structure and Evolution (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1994), 266–270.
5. Eduardo Bravo et al., “Chandrasekhar-Mass White Dwarfs Are the Progenitors of a Small Fraction of Type Ia Supernovae According to Nucleosynthesis Constraints,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters 517, no. 1 (November 2022): L31–L35, doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slac103; Paolo A. Mazzali et al., “A Common Explosion Mechanism for Type Ia Supernovae,” Science 315, no. 5813 (February 9, 2007): 825–828, doi:10.1126/science.1136259.
6. Hugh Ross, “Taking the Big Bang’s Temperature,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, April 4, 2022. 
7. Hugh Ross, “Neutron Star Merger Explains Why We’re Here (Expanded Version),” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, November 3, 2017.
8. Hugh Ross, “Big Bang Implications of Detecting the Universe’s First Stars,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, November 14, 2022; Hugh Ross, “J0023+0307, a Pristine Firstborn Star?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe (April 9, 2018); Hugh Ross, “Pursuing the Firstborn Stars and a Better Cosmic Creation Model,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe (July 15, 2019). 
9. Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2022), 90–92.
10. Hugh Ross, “Have Galactic Archaeologists Found Evidence for Design?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, June 6, 2022.
11. P. A. Oesch et al., “A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at Z = 11.1 Measured with Hubble Space Telescope Grism Spectroscopy,” Astrophysical Journal 819, no. 2 (March 8, 2016): id. 129, doi:10.3847/0004-637X/819/2/129.
12. Oeasch et al., “A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy,” p. 7.

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My Answer: There are over 30 space-time theorems in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Not all space-time theorems are supportive of the biblical cosmic beginning that includes the beginning of space and time. However, the few theorems that are not rule out the possibility of physical life ever existing in the universe. Therefore, the fact that we are alive in the universe establishes a cosmic beginning as the Bible teaches, which implies a cosmic Beginner as the Bible teaches.

Sean Carroll, a nontheistic theoretical physicist, has written a paper in which he presents what he calls the quantum eternity theorem. His theorem crucially depends on quantum space-time fluctuations during the quantum gravity era, the first 10^-43 seconds of cosmic history when the universe is so small, dense, and hot that all the forces of physics are unified into a single force large enough to permit a loophole in the space-time theorems. However, during the past several years astronomers have established many significant, independent constraints on the magnitude of quantum space-time fluctuations during the quantum gravity era. I have described and documented these constraints in this article: Quantum Gravity Constraints Affirm Cosmic Creator.    

All the established constraints provide more, not less, evidence for a space-time beginning and a cosmic Beginner. One hundred percent of the scientific observations and experiments sustain the biblical doctrine of a beginning of matter, energy, space, and time and a transcendent causal agent beyond matter, energy, space, and time. Scientific advances over the past century affirm that the more we learn about the universe the more evidence we accumulate for a cosmic Beginner/Designer.

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The answer from astronomers and physicists is that dark matter particles, regardless of how many such particles exist, by their very nature will be extraordinarily difficult to detect. Unlike ordinary matter, which is composed almost entirely of protons, neutrons, and electrons, dark matter either does not interact with light (photons) at all or interacts with light extremely weakly. Because of this very weak or nonexistent interaction, dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, which makes dark matter particles almost impossible to detect. 

Detection and Measurements of Dark Matter
In spite of the fact that astronomers and physicists have thus far been unsuccessful in their attempts to detect dark matter particles, they nevertheless are convinced that dark matter exists. The reason why is that astronomers observe the effects of dark matter’s gravity on the behavior of galaxies and galaxy clusters. They note that the structure and long-term stability of galaxies can only be explained if galaxies are surrounded by huge haloes of matter that interact very weakly or not at all with light. Figure 1 shows the inferred dark matter halo that envelops our Milky Way Galaxy (MWG). Dark matter makes up about 90% of the MWG’s total mass.

Figure 1: Milky Way Galaxy’s Dark Matter Halo and Stellar Disk
The central stellar bulge and the stellar disk are shown in black. The thin disk of gas appears in light gray. The much larger dark gray area depicts the dark matter halo. Credit: Hugh Ross

Astronomers also observe the effects of dark matter on maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation, also known as the radiation remaining from the cosmic creation event. These maps yield the most accurate measure of the total amount of dark matter in the universe. They reveal that dark matter comprises 85% of the total mass of the universe.²

Quest to Find Dark Matter Particles
Recent advances in cosmology and particle physics affirm that the cosmic creation model that best fits astronomical observations is fully compatible with the particle creation model that best fits the results of particle accelerator experiments. However, significantly more detailed and comprehensive particle and cosmic creation models would require the discovery and determination of the properties of dark matter particles. Consequently, for both astronomers and physicists the goal of discovering and measuring dark matter particles has become their “holy grail” quest. 

The two leading hypothesized candidates for dark matter particles are high-mass particles called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and extremely low mass particles called axions. (As an aside, physicists displayed their marketing expertise by trademarking WIMPs so as to cash in on any manufacturers who desire to call any of their products a WIMP!) 

The enormous mass difference between a WIMP and an axion implies that WIMPs will behave predominantly like discrete particles rather than like waves, whereas axions will behave predominantly like waves rather than like discrete particles. A team of astronomers led by Alfred Amruth has attempted to use this distinction to make headway in the quest to discover which particles comprise dark matter.³

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the gravity of a massive object will bend light around itself. Ever since 1919, astronomers have routinely affirmed this prediction of general relativity by observing the bending of starlight passing close to the Sun’s disk during solar eclipses. Now, astronomers are taking advantage of this gravitational lensing to detect very distant galaxies and quasars directly behind a foreground galaxy or galaxy cluster. If the distant galaxy or quasar is lined up perfectly behind a foreground galaxy, its image will be smeared out into a circle—what astronomers call an Einstein ring. Figure 2 shows an example of a near perfectly aligned gravitational lensing of a distant galaxy into an Einstein ring image.

Figure 2: Gravitational Lensing of a Distant Galaxy into an Einstein Ring
Gravitational lens LRG 3-757. Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Space Telescope

Amruth and his colleagues developed several theoretical models to determine the different ways that gravitationally lensed images of distant galaxies/quasars would be distorted if the dark matter (that they know is responsible for most of the lensing phenomena) were composed predominantly of WIMPs or of axions. They then examined images of real gravitationally lensed galaxies to see whether WIMPs or axions best explained the observed features of the lensed galaxies/quasars.

The most definitive test in their sample was the gravitational lens around the foreground galaxy HS 0810+2554.⁴ However, since the alignment was not perfect, astronomers observed four bright spots instead of an Einstein ring around the foreground galaxy. The distant quasar gravitationally lensed by HS 0810+2554 manifests variable light intensity. Therefore, astronomers have observed multiple distinct gravitationally lensed images of the distant quasar (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Three Observations at Different Times of a Quasar Gravitationally Lensed by HS 0810+2554
The scale bar to the bottom right of each image is 1 arcsecond. Credit: iweb.cfa.harvard.edu 

In their entire sample of gravitationally lensed images of distant quasars, Amruth’s team noted that the images predicted by their WIMP models did not match the actual images. However, the images predicted by their axion models didaccurately reproduce the images, especially those of HS 0810+2554. In particular, they demonstrated that the brightness and position anomalies of the images gravitationally lensed by the foreground galaxy are well explained if the dark matter halo surrounding the galaxy is dominated by axions where the axion mass, to within a factor of ten, = 10^-22 electron volts (for comparison, the mass of a proton = 928 million electron volts). Amruth and his colleagues also established that a dark matter halo surrounding HS 0810+2554 dominated by WIMPs fails to explain the observed features of the images gravitationally lensed by the galaxy. Consequently, the research team concluded that axions are a much more probable candidate than WIMPs for being the universe’s predominant dark matter particle. 

This research is the strongest evidence to date favoring axions as the dominant dark matter particle. However, it is not the only evidence favoring axions. The axion and WIMP dark matter particle models predict different kinds and populations of dwarf galaxies in the universe. The WIMP models predict that dark matter haloes will dramatically increase in number toward lower masses, with numbers dropping to zero at a dark matter halo mass of 1,000 solar masses. The axion models predict that the numbers of dark matter haloes will be increasingly suppressed below masses of about a billion times the Sun’s mass, assuming an axion mass of 10^-22 electron volts.⁵ The mass where suppression of dark matter haloes occurs is roughly proportional to the axion mass. 

Counts of the number of low mass dwarf galaxies in the Local Group favors the axion models over the WIMP models. Likewise, the observed abundance of low luminosity galaxies at high redshifts (large cosmological distances) favors axion models and strongly disfavors WIMP models.⁶ The axion models also explain why dwarf galaxies do not exhibit cusps,⁷ a feature that WIMP models can explain only by appealing to star formation feedback. Axion models, unlike WIMP models, can explain the stellar velocity dispersion of DF44, an ultra-diffuse dwarf galaxy.⁸  

Astronomers now possess the telescope power to observe the structure of the universe on the largest size scales. Observations conducted to date reveal a large-scale structure of the universe that fits the model holding that the universe’s dark matter is composed predominantly of axions.⁹ Astronomers have also observed white dwarf stars where the white dwarfs are cooling at faster rates than what thermodynamics alone would predict. The additional cooling could be explained if large numbers of axions exist in the white dwarf stars and if some of those axions are escaping or decaying.¹⁰  

Amruth and his team concluded their paper by noting that major gravitational lens surveys are underway. The database of well-observed gravitationally lensed images of distant quasars will exponentially increase within the next several years. Such a database could not only definitively establish axions as the predominant dark matter particle but also provide an accurate measure of the axion mass. Meanwhile, laboratory experiments to detect axions are underway and more sensitive experiments are being proposed and developed.¹¹

Philosophical Implications
The research achieved by Amruth and his teammates carries significant implications. It dispels the claim that scientists will never detect dark matter particles and removes any reasonable doubt of dark matter’s existence. It also provides yet more scientific evidence in support of the biblically predicted big bang creation model. Already, it has provided a more detailed and comprehensive model for the origin and history of the universe and for the origin and history of the universe’s fundamental particles. 

This work shows the research pathway for developing increasingly detailed and comprehensive cosmic and particle creation models. We can all look forward to the results. Once again, scientific advance affirms Psalm 19:1: “The heavens declare the glory of God.”

Endnotes

1. Hugh Ross, “What Does the Bible Say about the Big Bang?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, February 6, 2023.
2. G. Hinshaw et al., “Nine-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Parameter Results,” Astrophysical Journal Supplement 208, no. 2 (October 2013): id. 19, 5–11, doi:10.1088/0067-0049/208/2/19; P. A. R. Ade et al., Planck Collaboration, “Planck 2015 Results. XIII. Cosmological Parameters,”Astronomy & Astrophysics 594 (October 2016): id. A13, 1, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201525830; David N. Spergel, Raphael Flauger, and Renée Hložek, “Planck Data Reconsidered,” Physical Review D 91 (January 27, 2015): id. 023518, 1, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.91.023518.
3. Alfred Amruth et al., “Einstein Rings Modulated by Wavelike Dark Matter from Anomalies in Gravitationally Lensed Images,” Nature Astronomy (April 20, 2023), doi:10.1038/s41550-023-01943-9.
4. Neal Jackson et al., “Observations of Radio-Quiet Quasars at 10-mas Resolution by Use of Gravitational Lensing,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 454, no. 1 (November 2015): 287–298, doi:10.1093/mnras/stv1982.
5. Lam Hui et al., “Ultralight Scalars as Cosmological Dark Matter,” Physical Review D 95, no. 4 (February 15, 2017): id. 043541, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.95.043541.
6. Enoch Leung et al., “Magnification Bias of Distant Galaxies in the Hubble Frontier Fields: Testing Wave Versus Particle Dark Matter Predictions,” Astrophysical Journal 862, no. 2 (August 1, 2018): id. 156, doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aacdad.
7. Tom Broadhurst et al., “Ghostly Galaxies as Solitons of Bose-Einstein Dark Matter,” Physical Review D 101, no. 8 (April 15, 2020): id. 083012, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.101.083012.
8. Alvaro Pozo et al., “Detection of a Universal Core-Halo Transition in Dwarf Galaxies as Predicted by Bose-Einstein Dark Matter,” (December 17, 2021), preprint arXiv:2010.10337.
9. Hsi-Yu Schive, Tzihong Chiueh, and Tom Broadhurst, “Cosmic Structure as the Quantum Interference of a Coherent Dark Wave,” Nature Physics 10 (July 2014): 496–499, doi:10.1038/nphys2996.
10. J. Isern et al., “Axions and the Luminosity Function of White Dwarfs: The Thin and Thick Discs, and the Halo,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 478, no. 2 (August 2018): 2569–2575, doi:10.1093/mnras/sty1162; J. Isern et al., “Axions and the Pulsation Periods of Variable White Dwarfs Revisited,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 512 (March 2010): id. A86, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/200913716; J. Isern et al., “Axions and the Cooling of White Dwarf Stars,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 682, no. 2 (August 1, 2008): L109–L112, doi:10.1086/591042; Jordi Isern, “White Dwarfs as Advanced Physics Laboratories. The Axion Case,” in White Dwarfs as Probes of Fundamental Physics: Tracers of Planetary, Stellar, and Galactic Evolution, edited by Martin A. Barstow et al., Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union 357 (October 9, 2020): 138–153, doi:10.1017/S1743921320000873. 
11. Yannis K. Semertzidis and Sungwoo Youn, “Axion Dark Matter: How to See It?” Science Advances 8, no. 8 (February 23, 2022): id. abm9928, doi:10.1126/sciadv.abm9928.

The post How Dark Matter Particles Can Confirm <em class="algolia-search-highlight">Cosmic</em> Creation appeared first on Reasons to Believe.

Personal Quest
I was not raised in a Christian home, but since age seven I was intensely curious about the universe. By my mid-teens I recognized that if the universe had a beginning, that beginning would have profound philosophical and theological implications. That recognition led me to investigate the world’s major religions. My spiritual journey during my late teens culminated in an 18-month-long study of a Bible given to me by the Gideons. I clearly remember the night when, at 1:06 AM, I signed my name in the back of that Gideon Bible, committing my life to Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.

A major factor in committing my life to Christ was the mounting evidence for the big bang model and the Bible’s declaration that the universe had a beginning, one that included the creation of all matter, energy, space, and time. I was eager to see if the evidence for a cosmic beginning would continue to mount. 

Within weeks after that life-altering night, I was allowed to join the American Astronomical Society thanks to a written recommendation from Princeton physicist Robert Dicke. Included in my membership was a subscription to the Astrophysical Journal. 

One of the first issues I received included a short paper by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson announcing their discovery of a pervasive 3K cosmic background radiation.¹ Accompanying this paper was one by Robert Dicke and his team of graduate students that explained what Penzias and Wilson had discovered.² Dicke’s team pointed out that the pervasive radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson was the radiation left over from the cosmic creation event. Here was the additional evidence for a cosmic beginning I was hoping to see. There was much more to come.

Space-Time Theorems 
Soon after Penzias and Wilson’s discovery, physicists in Britain and South Africa began a study on the physics of space and time. In 1970, physicists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose published the first of the cosmic space-time theorems.³ They showed that the cosmic beginning is not just a beginning of matter and energy but also of space and time, just as the Bible declared thousands of years ago in, for example, 2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 1:2, and Hebrews 11:3.

Since 1970, physicists have produced over thirty space-time theorems. The most famous one is the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem.⁴ Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin demonstrated that, regardless of the homogeneity, isotropy, and energy conditions of the universe, the universe must be subject to an initial space-time singularity. Two years later, Vilenkin wrote in his book Many Worlds in One, “With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”⁵

Quantum Gravity   
Physicist Sean Carroll disputes the claim that there is no escaping a cosmic beginning. He points out that the proof of a cosmic beginning is based on what we know about the past 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the universe’s history. Carroll claims that previous to 10^-43 seconds after the cosmic origin event (the quantum gravity era where quantum mechanics may compete with gravity in determining the dynamics of the universe), a possibility exists for quantum space-time fluctuations or foam to have been sufficiently large to permit an escape from an initial space-time singularity.⁶

Quantum Gravity Tests
Carroll’s claim about a conceivable escape from a space-time beginning rests on the incapability of astronomers and physicists to perform experiments or make measurements about the state of the universe during that extremely brief quantum gravity era. To produce the energy conditions that existed during the quantum gravity era, physicists would need to construct a particle accelerator with an acceleration path length a billion trillion times longer than the CERN Large Hadron Collider’s 27 kilometers (17 miles). It would stretch from Earth out to the most distant quasars! Physicists and astronomers may dream of directly probing the quantum gravity era, but the possibility of the world’s governments funding a 12-billion-light-year-long particle accelerator anytime soon is remote.

The impracticality of constructing a particle accelerator that stretches out to the most distant quasars does not mean there is no hope for probing quantum gravity physics. What happens in the quantum gravity era does not always stay in the quantum gravity era. It leaks out. 

blurred quasar images: Quantum space-time fluctuations during the first tiny split second of the universe’s 13.8-billion-year existence accumulate or grow over light travel paths. That is, they become “frothier” over long pathways through space. Such an accumulation would blur the images of distantly observed quasars and blazars in proportion to the sizes of the quantum space-time fluctuations existing during the quantum gravity era. (A blazar is a quasar where the relativistic jet of ionized matter generated outside the event horizon of the quasar’s supermassive black hole is pointed directly or nearly directly at Earth.) The longer the distance, the greater the degree of blurring. The shorter the wavelength of observation, the greater the degree of blurring. 

So far, observations at visual and ultraviolet wavelengths by the Hubble Space Telescope fail to detect any blurring of distant quasar images.⁷ In 2015, a team of six astronomers led by Eric Perlman used x-ray observations of quasars from the Chandra X-Ray Space Telescope to establish tighter constraints on quantum gravity speculations.⁸ They also demonstrated how observations of quasars at gamma-ray wavelengths with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and ground-based Cerenkov telescopes could constrain quantum gravity speculations to a much greater degree.

deviations from Lorentz invariance: Lorentz invariance (aka Lorentz symmetry) is the proposition that the laws of physics are the same for all observers in the universe. Many quantum gravity models, in particular models with large quantum space-time fluctuations and Loop Quantum Gravity models, predict that Lorentz invariance will be violated at high energy scales, higher than the Planck energy of 1.22 x 10¹⁹ GeV (1 GeV = 1 billion electron volts or 1.602 x 10^-10joules), and that tiny deviations from Lorentz invariance will occur at lower energy scales. Observations with the Fermi Space Telescope of an intense gamma-ray flare from the blazar PKS 2155-304, 1.5 billion light-years away, established that there was no violation of Lorentz invariance for energy levels less than 2.1 x 10¹⁸ GeV, assuming a linear dependence on photon speed with energy, and less than 6.4 x 10¹⁰ GeV, assuming a quadratic dependence on photon speed with energy.⁹

In 2018, a team of eight astronomers led by Carlo Romoli published their analysis of an extremely bright gamma-ray flare emission from the blazar 3C 279 (see figure 1).¹⁰ Romoli’s team achieved quantum gravity limits nearly as stringent as those derived from PKS 2155-304’s gamma-ray flare. They determined that no violation of Lorentz invariance occurred for energy levels less than 1.7 x 10¹⁷ GeV, assuming a linear dependence on photon speed with energy, and less than 2.0 x 10¹⁰ GeV, assuming a quadratic dependence on photon speed with energy.

Figure 1: Blazar 3C 279 Imaged at Gamma-Ray Wavelengths by the Compton Observatory
Credit: NASA

In 2021, four astronomers led by Qi-Qi Zhou used 37 groups of multiwavelength polarization measurements collected from five blazars, spanning a distance range from 1.5 to 4.7 billion light-years, to establish stringent constraints on possible Lorentz invariance violations.¹¹ If Lorentz invariance is violated, the group velocities of left- and right-handed circularly polarized photons that are emitted from the same astrophysical source should differ slightly, leading to vacuum birefringence. Zhou’s team used the polarization measurements from the five blazars to calculate the birefringence parameter, h. If there is no Lorentz invariance violation at all, then h = 0.  Zhou and his colleagues established at a 95% confidence level that h must be less than 8.91 x 10^-7 (or 0.000000891).

Physicists Fabian Kislat and Henric Krawczynski analyzed optical polarization data from 72 active galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts to establish an exceptionally stringent limit on a large category of quantum gravity models.¹² Their analysis established a lower limit on the energy scale of quantum gravity that is a million times higher than the Planck energy, “severely limiting the phase space for any [quantum gravity] theory that predicts a rotation of the photon polarization quadratic in energy.”¹³

Other quantum gravity models predict that at energy levels far below the Planck energy the propagation speed of very-high-energy gamma rays will deviate from the velocity of light. Specifically, photons of different energies emitted simultaneously from a source in a distant galaxy would arrive at different times. The Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) Collaboration measured the arrival times of the most energetic photons ever detected, those from the 25-second gamma-ray burst event GRB 190114C (see figure 2), in a galaxy 4.5 billion light-years away. It determined that any departure from the velocity of light by GRB 190114C’s gamma rays must be less than 1.7 x 10^-17 (again, a very tiny number).¹⁴  

Figure 2: Hubble Space Telescope Image of the GRB 190114C’s Afterglow
The blue colors beyond the core signal reveal the presence of hot, young stars, indicating that GRB 101114C’s host galaxy likely is a large spiral galaxy. Credit: NASA

Four other astrophysicists used spectral lag data from the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) satellite to analyze multiple gamma-ray burst events from multiple distant galaxies.¹⁵ They established that, at a 95% confidence level, there was no violation of Lorentz invariance for energy levels less than 3.7 x 10¹⁸ GeV, again assuming a linear dependence on photon speed with energy. They also point out that detecting gamma-ray burst events with energies greater than 100 GeV will become routine in the near future, which will enable direct tests of Lorentz invariance at energy levels greater than the Planck energy. While not yet routine and frequent, the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), MAGIC, and Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) experiments have detected gamma rays at energy levels from 200 to 500 GeV from MAXI J1820+070, an x-ray binary star where one member is a black hole.¹⁶   

Already, however, astrophysicists have achieved a definitive test at energies above the Planck energy. A team of nine astrophysicists led by Vlasios Vasileiou analyzed emission from four bright gamma-ray bursts observed by the Fermi Space Telescope.¹⁷ The team determined that, at a 95% confidence level, there was no violation of Lorentz invariance for energy levels less than 7.6 times the Planck energy, again assuming a linear dependence on photon speed with energy. In a subsequent article, Vasileiou and his colleagues declared, “Our results set a benchmark constraint to be reckoned with by any QG [quantum gravity] model that features spacetime quantization.”¹⁸

The most recent effort is by a team of 18 astrophysicists undertaking a project to gather the biggest sample of gamma-ray sources in distant galaxies from the H.E.S.S., MAGIC, and VERITAS collaborations to yield the most stringent constraint on the quantum gravity energy scale. So far, they have developed all the statistical methods they need for processing the data and have optimized their methods through computer simulations.¹⁹ In a forthcoming paper, they will publish their quantum gravity constraints.

black hole properties: Different quantum gravity models affect the properties of black holes in distinct ways. For example, physicists Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto demonstrated that if primordial black holes exist, they could produce strong signals, detectable by current gamma-ray telescopes, that would reveal the nature of quantum gravity physics.²⁰ (Primordial black holes are hypothetical black holes that formed soon after the big bang, when the density of matter was so great that black holes of much less mass than stellar black holes may have formed and, thus, could evaporate in less time than the age of the universe.) Physicists Carlos Barceló, Raúl Carballo-Rubio, and Luis J. Garay showed that certain quantum gravity models predict echoes in the ringdown of gravitational waves from black hole merger events that would be detectable by currently existing gravity wave telescopes.²¹

Physicists Hal Haggard and Carlo Rovelli calculated where, relative to the event horizons of supermassive black holes, nonperturbative quantum gravity phenomena would be maximally detectable by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global array of millimeter-wave radio telescopes stretching from Asia to Hawaii to Germany and from the South Pole to Greenland.²² In 2013, physicist Steven Giddings explained how—in some quantum gravity models—quantum space-time fluctuations could distort or suppress the photon ring or the edge of the shadow of supermassive black holes.²³ In 2023, physicists Arundhati Dasgupta and José Fajardo-Montenegro demonstrated additional ways observable effects of certain quantum gravity models could be detected or constrained by the EHT.²⁴ While the initial image of the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way Galaxy’s center produced by the EHT (see figure 3) is not yet detailed enough to test quantum gravity models, future images from the EHT may well be. 

Figure 3: Initial Event Horizon Telescope Image of the Milky Way Galaxy’s Supermassive Black Hole
The dark core shows the event horizon, within which no light can escape the black hole’s gravity. The bright ring exterior to the event horizon is where matter being drawn into the black hole is being converted into energy with 10–42% efficiency. Credit: EHT Collaboration      

nano-diamonds: In 2021, a team of ten physicists led by Yair Margalit successfully built and demonstrated the operation of a Stern-Gerlach effect interferometer for experiments on single atoms.²⁵ In 2023, two Israeli physicists demonstrated how a Stern-Gerlach interferometer could be used to levitate and manipulate nano-diamonds in a weak magnetic field.²⁶ Nano-diamonds are diamonds with diameters between a billionth and a ten-millionth of a meter. The number of individual carbon atoms in nano-diamonds would range from a few hundred to several thousand. The two physicists showed how accurate measurements of rotations of nano-diamonds in a Stern-Gerlach interferomenter could yield fundamental tests or constraints on quantum gravity models. 

Cosmic Creation Implications
Without exception, all observations relevant to the quantum gravity era that have been performed to date sustain a space-time beginning to the universe. The diverse quantum gravity tests that astronomers have achieved demonstrate that the more scientists learn about the universe, the more scientific evidence they accumulate that a God beyond space and time created the universe of matter, energy, space, and time. One hundred percent of the empirical evidence sustains a cosmic beginning in all the detail that the Bible declared thousands of years ago.

Have astronomers eliminated all possible speculations about a no-beginning universe? No. To do so would require that they possess exhaustively complete knowledge about every feature of the universe. Since astronomers are constrained in their observations and experiments to the cosmic space-time dimensions and the laws of physics, they can never accumulate complete knowledge about the universe. What they can do is progressively squeeze atheistic speculations about the universe into a smaller and smaller corner of possible speculation. Thanks to the quantum gravity tests accomplished by twenty-first century astronomers, the remaining corner of atheistic speculation is now mindbendingly tiny. By contrast, these tests provide progressively stronger scientific evidence for a cosmic beginning consistent with the biblical texts.  

Endnotes

1. Arno A. Penzias and Robert A. Wilson, “A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s,” Astrophysical Journal 142 (July 1965): 419–421, doi:10.1086/148307.
2. Robert H. Dicke et al., “Cosmic Black-Body Radiation,” Astrophysical Journal 142 (July 1965): 414–419, doi:10.1086/148306.
3. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, “The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A 314, no. 1519 (January 27, 1970): 529–548, doi:10.1098/rspa.1970.0021.
4. Arvind Borde, Alan H. Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, “Inflationary Spacetimes Are Incomplete in Past Directions,” Physical Review Letters 90, no. 15 (April 15, 2003): id. 151301, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.151301.
5. Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 176.
6. Sean M. Carroll, “What If Time Really Exists?” (November 23, 2008), eprint: arXiv:0811.3722; Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (New York: Dutton, 2010). 
7. F. Tamburini et al., “No Quantum Gravity Signature from the Farthest Quasars,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 533 (September 2011): id. A71, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201015808.
8. E. S. Perlman et al., “New Constraints on Quantum Gravity from X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Observations,” Astrophysical Journal 805, no. 1 (May 13, 2015): id. 10, doi:10.1088/0004-637X/805/1/10.
9. H.E.S.S. Collaboration, A. Abramowski et al., “Search for Lorentz Invariance Breaking with a Likelihood Fit of the PKS 2155-304 Flare Data Taken on MJD 53944,” Astroparticle Physics 34, no. 9 (April 2011): 738–747, doi:10.1016/j.astropartphys.2011.01.007.
10. Carlo Romoli et al., “Observation of the Extremely Bright Flare of the FSRQ 3C279 with H.E.S.S. II,” Proceedings of Science 301 (August 3, 2018): id. 649, doi:10.22323/1.301.0649.
11. Qi-Qi Zhou et al., “Constraints on Lorentz Invariance Violation with Multiwavelength Polarized Astrophysical Sources,” Galaxies 9, no. 2 (June 2021): 44, doi:10.3390/galaxies9020044.
12. Fabian Kislat and Henric Krawczynski, “Planck-Scale Constraints on Anisotropic Lorentz and CPT Invariance Violations from Optical Polarization Measurements,” Physical Review D 95, no. 8 (April 27, 2017): id. 083013, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.95.083013.
13. Kislat and Krawczynski, “Planck-Scale Constraints,” 1.
14. V. A. Acciari et al., “Bounds on Lorentz Invariance Violation from MAGIC Observation of GRB 190114C,” Physical Review Letters 125, no. 2 (July 10, 2020): id. 021301, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.021301.
15. D. J. Bartlett et al., “Constraints on Quantum Gravity and the Photon Mass from Gamma Ray Bursts,” Physical Review D 104, no. 10 (November 15, 2021): id. 103516, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.104.103516.
16. H. Abe et al., “Gamma-Ray Observations of MAXI J1820+070 during the 2018 Outburst,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 517, no. 4 (December 2022): 4736–4751, doi:10.1093/mnras/stac2686.
17. V. Vasileiou et al., “Constraints on Lorentz Invariance Violation from Fermi-Large Area Telescope Observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts,” Physical Review D 87, no. 12 (June 15, 2013): id. 122001, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.87.122001.
18. Vlasios Vasileiou et al., “A Planck-Scale Limit on Spacetime Fuzziness and Stochastic Lorentz Invariance Violation,” Nature Physics 11, no. 4 (April 2015): 344–346, doi:10.1038/nphys3270.
19. Julien Bolmont et al., “First Combined Study on Lorentz Invariance Violation from Observations of Energy-Dependent Time Delays from Multiple-Type Gamma Ray Sources. I. Motivation, Method Description, and Validation through Simulations of H.E.S.S., MAGIC, and VERITAS Data Sets,” Astrophysical Journal 930, no. 1 (May 1, 2022): id. 75, doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac5048.
20. Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto, “Planck Stars,” International Journal of Modern Physics D 23, no. 12 (December 18, 2014): id. 1442026, doi:10.1142/S0218271814420267.
21. Carlos Barceló, Raúl Carballo-Rubio, and Luis J. Garay, “Gravitational Wave Echoes from Macroscopic Quantum Gravity Effects,” Journal of High Energy Physics (May 10, 2017): id. 54, doi:10.1007/JHEP05(2017)054.
22. Hal M. Haggard and Carlo Rovelli, “Quantum Gravity Effects Around Sagittarius A*,” International Journal of Modern Physics D 25, no. 12 (September 28, 2016): id. 1644021, doi:10.1142/S0218271816440211. 
23. Steven B. Giddings, “Possible Observational Windows for Quantum Effects from Black Holes,” Physical Review D90, no. 12 (December 15, 2014): id.124033, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.90.124033.
24. Arundhati Dasgupta and José Fajardo-Montenegro, “Aspects of Quantum Gravity Phenomenology and Astrophysics,” Universe 9, no. 3 (March 2023): id. 128, doi:10.3390/universe9030128.
25. Yair Margalit et al., “Realization of a Complete Stern-Gerlach Interferometer: Toward a Test of Quantum Gravity,” Science Advances 7, no. 22 (May 28, 2021): id. abg2879, doi:10.1126/sciadv.abg2879.
26. Yonathan Japha and Ron Folman, “Quantum Uncertainty Limit for Stern-Gerlach Interferometry with Massive Objects,” Physical Review Letters 130, no. 11 (March 17, 2023): id. 113602, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.113602.

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Each chapter in Designed to the Core showcases astounding realities, discovered within the past few years, about the interior features of humanity’s home on all its size scales. Ultimately, my goal is to probe the meaning of what can be seen and measured. At no other time in human history has our knowledge of the heavens and Earth increased at such a rapid rate. In my own discipline of astrophysics, the knowledge base doubles every five years. I’m so grateful to my Creator that he placed me on Earth at the time he did and gave me the mind and technology that he did so that I can discover and understand—to a degree never before possible in human history—the glory of God revealed in the heavens.

Overwhelming Impression of Design
As I searched through the scientific literature in preparation for writing Designed to the Core, I was blown away by the recognition that, at every cosmic size scale, humans exist within an incredibly narrow time window and equally incredibly small space that permits our existence. The fact that all these relatively independent narrow time windows and spatial regions, for the first time in the universe’s history, simultaneously overlap one another defies any conceivable naturalistic explanation and testifies of the great care of the Creator for human beings.

Every astronomer and physicist I’ve engaged, regardless of their worldview, agrees that the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to make the existence of life, and humans in particular, possible. As agnostic astronomer Paul Davies wrote in his book The Cosmic Blueprint concerning the features of the universe, “The impression of design is overwhelming.”¹ The design Davies refers to is that the presence of intelligent physical observers in the universe (beings capable of measuring astronomical bodies and phenomena) requires that multiple characteristics of the universe fit within certain limited, fine-tuned ranges.

Fine-Tuning and the Fine-Tuner
Fine-tuning requires a shaping source. The greater the degree and pervasiveness of fine-tuning, the more capable must be the fine-tuner. Therefore, pursuing evidence of cosmic fine-tuning for humanity’s benefit has profound personal, philosophical, and theological significance.

If the observed fine-tuned designs prove to be of little or no consequence, then one could surmise that no intentionality or purpose is implied. On the other hand, if the observed fine-tuning is multifaceted and each facet is crucial for making human existence possible, then the fine-tuning source must be more than a mindless, impersonal force or process. The more numerous, specific, and purposeful the fine-tuned requirements, the more the required features reveal about the characteristics and identity of the fine-tuner.

Is Cosmic Fine-Tuning Meaningful?
Not everyone agrees, however, that the observed cosmic fine-tuning is meaningful. Many astronomers and physicists point out that for human observers the sample size of universes is one and always will be one. With a sample size of just one, skeptics argue that one cannot make a statistically significant argument for a personal, intentional fine-tuner. Who is to say that our universe is exceptional?

While the sample size limitation is true for universes, such is not the case for supergalaxy clusters, galaxy clusters, galaxies, stars, planets, moons, and comet belts. In each case, the sample size is in the millions or much greater. The fine-tuning argument for the existence and operation of the God of the Bible becomes far more compelling if one can demonstrate we live in an extraordinarily exceptional region of the cosmic web and that our supergalaxy cluster, galaxy cluster, galaxy group, galaxy, galactic arm, galactic bubble, galactic fluff, planetary system, comet-asteroid belt system, moon, and planet all possess unique, fine-tuned characteristics that make it possible for humans to exist and thrive.

If on all size scales, from the largest cosmic structures to the tiniest, one sees multiple characteristics that must fit within very limited fine-tuned ranges, then it becomes unreasonable for any rational person to deny that a personal, intelligent, intentional, purposeful Fine-Tuner exists. The argument for such a Fine-Tuner becomes all the more compelling if one can demonstrate that—at all cosmic size scales—the more we discover and learn, the stronger the evidence becomes for the existence and operation of this Fine-Tuner. This latter point parrots a theme in the Psalms and the book of Job: the more we learn about nature, the more evidence we will uncover for the supernatural handiwork of God.

Sharing the Excitement of Discovery
My wife, Kathy, will tell you I was on cloud nine doing the research for Designed to the Core. I couldn’t help but share with her my excitement and thrill at what I was reading in the latest scientific literature. The scientists writing the papers typically were silent about the philosophical implications of their discoveries. I couldn’t keep quiet. I had to write about it.

Everyone who has read the book so far has had the same experience I had in writing it. They were blown away by the astounding philosophical implications of the discoveries. My desire is that you, too, will learn of the exacting care that our loving Creator has taken to design a cosmos in such intelligent, exquisite detail. I also hope that your excitement will fuel discussions with others about their purpose in God’s grand cosmic design. 

Endnote

1. Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 203.

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How does salvation relate to all of creation? Evangelicals rightly emphasize the personal responsibility of every individual before a holy God. However, sometimes we have the tendency to see salvation as a personal escape pod. We struggle to connect the individualistic dots to the bigger cosmic picture of redemption for all of creation. Fortunately, we are not left without guidance. In recent years, a number of evangelical theologians have argued for a rediscovery of the early fathers. The patristic writers affirmed the truths of Scripture just like we do, but they zeroed in on certain points that we often neglect. As a result, I contend that they had a more robust understanding of the cosmic implications of salvation than we do. This paper highlights some of their emphases by looking at the works of Irenaeus of Lyon (c.130–c.202 AD) and Athanasius of Alexandria (c.296–373 AD).

The post The Salvation of Creation: <em class="algolia-search-highlight">Cosmic</em> Aspects of Redemption appeared first on Reasons to Believe.

The team of 29 researchers led by Michael Kramer of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy published the results of their 16-year study of the orbital changes in the pulsar system PSR J0737-3039A/B.¹ This system is the only known case of two active pulsars orbiting one another. A pulsar is a neutron star that produces regular pulsating radio emissions as a result of possessing a strong magnetic field. Pulsars spin extremely fast and emit powerful beams of light that “pulse” into our view, similar to the way we see beams of light from a lighthouse.

The two pulsars (a two-star system is known as a binary) in the PSR J0737-3039 system, A and B, have rotation rates of 22.70 and 2.77 milliseconds, respectively. Therefore, radio astronomers observe 44 and 361 pulses of radiation every second from A and B, respectively.

The present orbital period of B about A is just 2.454 hours. This orbital period is the shortest yet known for pulsars with a binary companion. It is a factor of three times shorter than the pulsar-neutron star system PSR B1913+16, which delivered the previous best test of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a measurement for which physicists Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse were awarded the 1993 Nobel prize in Physics.

The Double Pulsar
The two neutron stars in the PSR J0737-3039 system have masses of 1.338 and 1.249 times the Sun’s mass. The diameters of these stars are about 116,000 times smaller than the Sun’s. Their densities exceed 2 billion tons per teaspoonful!

This binary system’s orbital eccentricity is 0.088 (for comparison Earth’s orbital eccentricity = 0.0167). The rotational stability (pulsing frequency) of the two neutron stars is comparable to the best atomic clocks. Previous long-term studies of other pulsars’ extremely tiny departures from rotational stability reveal that neutron stars possess a solid crust of neutrons and a liquid interior of neutrons.

Gravitational theories are best tested where one or two neutron stars are in a binary system. The best such candidates are where two neutron stars orbit one another and where both neutron stars are pulsars. Better yet is when the two pulsars have a short orbital period, a nonzero orbital eccentricity, and orbital planes closely aligned to our line of sight. It is remarkable, and some would say a gift from God, that the only known binary pulsar manifests all these optimal features for testing theories of gravity.

Seven Tests
To measure the pulses from the PSR J0737-3039 system, Kramer’s team used six of the largest radio telescopes (the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope, the Jodrell Bank Observatory, the Nançay Radio Observatory, the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, and the Parkes radio telescope) plus the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). The VLBA consists of ten 25-meter radio telescopes stretching from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands that are linked together as an interferometer. The VLBA was crucial for determining an accurate direct distance measurement to the PSR J0737-3039 system, without which precision tests of GR would not have been possible. Measurements from the seven telescope systems provided seven different tests.

Kramer’s team was patient. They continued observing the PSR J0737-3039 pulsars month after month, year after year, without publishing any results. Even when the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations published their direct detections of the gravity waves predicted by GR from the mergers of black holes and neutron stars,² Kramer’s team stood pat. They waited until they accumulated enough measurements to determine the energy carried away by gravitational waves to 1,000 times greater precision than anything achieved by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave telescopes.

Background to the Tests
GR has passed every experimental and observational test that astronomers and physicists have devised to date. I described these tests in The Creator and the Cosmos, 4th edition.³ The tests left no doubt that GR is the final answer in describing gravity. There is one regime (natural phenomenon), however, where a possibility existed that an alternate theory of gravity may substantially contribute. That regime is the extremely strong gravitational fields that exist near neutron stars and black holes. The gravitational field on the surface of a typical neutron star is about 200 billion times that at Earth’s surface. Hence, a 200-pound man on Earth would weigh 20 billion tons on a neutron star!

What the Tests Accomplished
The patience of Kramer’s team paid off. Their observations yielded the most wide-ranging and precise tests of GR for strong gravitational field regimes. Through observing the reductions in the neutron stars’ masses, size of their orbit, and tiny variations in the timing of their pulses, Kramer and his colleagues achieved seven distinct tests of GR.

Two of the seven tests had never been performed. For example, Kramer’s team showed how photons from one of the neutron stars slowed down and their directional path bent as they passed through the intense gravitational field of the other neutron star. The effects they observed fit what GR predicted. Another first-time test was the demonstration of the manner in which gravity distorted the shape of the neutron stars’ orbit—again, just as GR predicted.

The results of the seven tests expressed as observations compared to GR predictions are as follows:⁴

Shapiro delay is named after Irwin Shapiro, who made the first high-precision tests of GR in the 1970s.⁵ We were on the research staff at Caltech at the same time, and I enjoyed several conversations with him about GR tests and their implications.

The results of these seven tests come from 16.2 years of observing the PSR J0737-3039 system. The results will inevitably improve with more observing time. (The measuring errors are reduced by the square root of the observing time. For example, four years of measurements compared to just one year of measurements reduces the measuring error by a factor of two.) Dramatic improvements are expected in just 10–20 years. Within a decade, improved measurements of the orbital deformation of the pulsars’ spin precessions will yield the values of the neutron stars’ diameters.

Physical and Philosophical Implications
The values of the neutron stars’ diameters will enable astronomers to understand the behavior of the densely packed neutrons in their interiors. This knowledge will yield improved refinements and insights into particle creation models.

The team’s published results have already yielded new insights about the properties of the interstellar medium between PSR J0737-3039 and Earth, and future observations will produce several more insights. Future observations also promise to deliver more comprehensive and detailed models for the formation of double pulsar systems and the likelihood of discovering one or more of these systems.

The most exciting outcome from the researchers’ results is that GR now stands as, by far, the most exhaustively tested and affirmed principle in physics. GR has now been affirmed under all gravitational field regimes.

This affirmation should be good news for all theists and especially Christians. The space-time theorems have proved that the universe has a beginning. That beginning includes the beginning of space and time and is based on the assumptions that the universe contains mass and that GR reliably describes the dynamics of massive bodies in the universe. Thanks to how exhaustively GR has been tested and shown to pass all tests with flying colors, we can be extremely confident that the universe has a beginning and that a Causal Agent beyond space and time created our universe of matter, energy, space, and time just as the Bible declared thousands of years ago.⁶

Endnotes

1. Michael Kramer et al., “Strong-Field Gravity Tests with the Double Pulsar,” Physical Review X 11, no. 4 (December 13, 2021): id. 041050, doi:10.1103/PhysRevX.11.041050.

2. B. P. Abbott et al., “Astrophysical Implications of the Binary Black Hole Merger GW150914,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 818, no. 2 (February 20, 2016): id. L22, doi:10.3847/2041-8205/818/2/L22; Hugh Ross, “How Gravitational Waves Help Explain the Universe’s Beginning,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, March 10, 2016.

3. Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, 4th edition (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2018), 114–120.

4. Kramer et al., “Strong-Field Gravity Tests,” 37.

5. Irwin I. Shapiro, “Fourth Test of General Relativity,” Physical Review Letters 13, no. 26 (December 28, 1964): 789–791, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.789.

6. Hugh Ross with John Rea, “Big Bang—The Bible Taught It First!,” Reasons to Believe (July 1, 2000); Hugh Ross, “Does the Bible Teach Big Bang Cosmology?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, August 26, 2019.

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Searching for Sterile Neutrinos
It’s possible that a large fraction of the universe’s dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos. Thus, researchers spend considerable effort trying to detect them. In 2011, I wrote five articles about sterile neutrinos.¹ Sterile neutrinos are distinguished from the active neutrinos that I described in last week’s article, “Neutrino Breakthroughs: More Evidence for Cosmic Creation and Design.”² Active neutrinos interact very weakly with photons, protons, neutrons, and electrons through the weak nuclear force and the gravitational force. Active neutrinos come in three “flavors” or types: electron, muon, and tau. Sterile neutrinos are hypothetical particles that are believed to interact only through the gravitational force.

The standard particle creation model requires that there be exactly three different types of active neutrinos. However, if sterile neutrinos exist, there must be at least three different types of sterile neutrinos.³

So far, the only dark matter particles that astronomers and particle physicists have detected are the three active neutrinos. As I stated in my previous article, new measurements establish the sum of the individual electron, muon, and tau neutrino masses = 0.05841–0.087 electron volts (eV). This mass range implies that active neutrinos comprise just a small fraction of the universe’s dark matter.

Astronomers and physicists have proposed that either sterile neutrinos or axions (another hypothetical elementary particle) or both could make up the majority of the universe’s dark matter. These two particles hold the potential of explaining the following cosmic mysteries:

1. Why the first stars apparently form as early in cosmic history as they do
2. Why the universe produces slightly more baryons (protons and neutrons) than antibaryons
3. Why core-collapse supernovae produce unexpectedly high abundances of certain elements with atomic weight greater than 100
4. Why supernova shocks are so highly energetic
5. Why dark matter halos are relatively symmetrical and smooth
6. Why supermassive black holes form as early as they do in cosmic history
7. How to account for a small amount of warm dark matter to accompany the predominant cold dark matter that astronomers observe

Consequently, for the past two decades astronomers and physicists have sought to discover—both in the lab and in the sky—the existence of sterile neutrinos and/or axions. In the next few sections, I summarize the results of various lines of research. It’s technical, so skim if desired and get the overall picture as you proceed to “Philosophical Implications.”

Laboratory Sterile Neutrino Detections?
In 2018, the MiniBooNE Collaboration announced that they had discovered an excess of electron neutrino oscillations in their MiniBooNE short-baseline neutrino experiment.⁴ They interpreted this excess as evidence for the existence of a fourth neutrino type at a significance level of 4.7 standard deviations (equivalent to 99.99% certainty). An excess of neutrino oscillation events was also detected by the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) with a similar level of certainty for the existence of a fourth neutrino type.⁵

Theoretical physicist Joachim Kopp, staff scientist at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, explained in a brief article why the signal detected by the MiniBooNE and LSND experiments is evidence for a sterile neutrino.⁶ Additional evidence for a fourth neutrino type came from an antineutrino anomaly observed in a French nuclear reactor that is best explained as an excess of electron neutrino oscillations⁷ and from measurements of antineutrinos in the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China.⁸ The Daya Bay reactor produced 6% fewer antineutrinos than would be the case if only three neutrino types existed. However, combining the antineutrino flux and spectra of the Daya Bay results suggests that the antineutrinos might not be missing after all. It is possible that the predictions from nuclear theory could be incomplete.

Astronomical Sterile Neutrino Detections?
In 2014, a team of astronomers led by Esra Bulbul detected a weak x-ray emission line in the stacked x-ray spectrum of 73 clusters of galaxies.⁹ Bulbul’s team demonstrated how the decay of sterile neutrinos with a mass of 7.1 keV best explains this spectral line. Also in 2014, a team of astronomers led by Alexey Boyarsky detected the same x-ray emission line in the core of the Andromeda Galaxy and in the Perseus Galaxy Cluster.¹⁰

Neutrinos suppress the growth of large-scale structure in the universe in proportion to the total mass of the neutrino types. Neutrinos also affect the expansion rate history of the universe. Therefore, observations of the clustering of galaxies and galaxy clusters plus maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the radiation remaining from the cosmic creation event) place constraints on the number of neutrino types and on the total mass of the different neutrino type particles.

The most sensitive maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) yield a measurement of the effective number of neutrino types. Since the three active neutrino types were not completely decoupled at the moment of electron-positron annihilation that occurred when the universe was only a few seconds old, these three types, by themselves, would give a measure for the effective number of neutrino types, N_eff = 3.046.¹¹ The best map of the CMBR, the Planck 2018 map, produced a measure of N_eff = 2.99 ± 0.17.¹² This measurement implies with 95% certainty that N_eff must be less than 3.34. Furthermore, observational constraints on the primordial abundances of helium, deuterium, and lithium¹³ make a value of N_eff = 4 highly unlikely.¹⁴ As the Planck Collaboration wrote in their paper, “The presence of a light thermalized sterile neutrino is in strong contradiction with cosmological data.”¹⁵ Even where the production of sterile neutrinos is suppressed by nonstandard interactions, the sterile neutrino mass cannot be any greater than 0.23 eV. Combining the Planck and Daya Bay data provides an upper limit of 0.2 eV for the sterile neutrino mass in all possible scenarios.¹⁵

Latest Constraints on Sterile Neutrinos
Three physicists in Britain, Italy, and Spain combined the latest CMBR, baryon acoustic oscillation, type Ia supernovae, and cosmic structure growth rate observations to produce the tightest constraint on the total number of neutrino types. Their result was N_eff = 3.05 ± 0.16, which means with 95% certainty that N_eff must be less than 3.37.¹⁶ Meanwhile, the MiniBooNE Collaboration upgraded their experiment, dramatically improving its sensitivity. It is now called the MicroBooNE experiment.

In a preprint posted on October 29, 2021, the MicroBooNE Collaboration presented results from their initial observations of electron neutrino interactions from the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam using the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber.¹⁷ They achieved greater sensitivity than with MiniBooNE earlier, and found no excess of electron neutrino oscillation events. That is, they found no hint for the existence of sterile neutrinos.

Undeterred, researchers will reemploy MicroBooNE, which is set to deliver even more sensitive results. Another laboratory experiment, the STEREO experiment, is primed to achieve high-sensitivity output.¹⁸ Meanwhile, the X-ray sky is about to be probed by the eROSITA and Athena missions¹⁹ and the KM3NeT/ORCA telescope.²⁰ If sterile neutrinos are lurking somewhere in the universe, they cannot remain hidden for long.

Constraints on Axions
As I explained in previous articles, the existence of substantial numbers of axions would cause white dwarf stars to cool at more rapid rates.²¹ As far back as 1992, observations of white dwarf cooling had established that axions, if they exist, could not have a particle mass greater than 0.01 eV.²² About a decade ago, two different teams of astronomers demonstrated that the excess cooling of white dwarfs is well explained by axion emission where the axion particle mass is just a few milli-eV.²³ While this excess cooling yielded the first positive indication that axions exist, it implied that axions provide only a small fraction of the universe’s dark matter.

The existence of axions was firmed up by the analysis of additional observations made by one of the two teams. The team led by Jordi Isern noted that the observed excess cooling of white dwarf stars could be an artifact introduced by the star formation rate. However, white dwarf populations in our galaxy’s thin disk, thick disk, and halo each have different star formation rates. The fact that astronomers observe the same excess cooling in all three white dwarf populations means that the excess cooling cannot be an artifact of the star formation rate. It is likely due to axion emission. Isern’s team derived an axion particle mass in the range of 4–10 milli-eV.²⁴

The future of axion astronomy looks promising. More extensive observations of white dwarf cooling curves are underway and an axion telescope, the solar axioscope IAXO, is under development.²⁵ If axions are part of the universe’s undetected dark matter, astronomers will likely know soon.

Philosophical Implications
The constraints on the possible existence of sterile neutrinos have reached a point where, even if they do exist, they cannot make up a significant fraction of dark matter in the universe. Likewise, it is becoming increasingly evident that axions do not comprise a substantial fraction of the universe’s dark matter.

The universe’s dark matter is predominantly cold dark matter that’s comprised of particles traveling at much less than light’s velocity. However, a tiny fraction of the universe’s dark matter is warm dark matter that’s comprised of particles moving at a significant fraction of light’s velocity. Sterile neutrinos, if they exist, would be warm dark matter. It is possible, given current detection limits, that sterile neutrinos make up all, or most, of the universe’s warm dark matter. Axions, on the other hand, are cold dark matter particles.

That sterile neutrinos and/or axions do not comprise a substantial fraction of the universe’s dark matter does not mean that dark matter theories are in trouble. Astronomers and physicists have over thirty other candidate particles that could comprise the universe’s dark matter. However, sterile neutrinos and/or axions, if they do make up most of the universe’s dark matter, hold the greatest prospect for detection. The search for other dark matter candidate particles will be more challenging technologically. This is how science advances. It often takes many small steps to achieve breakthroughs. That’s why scientists test and retest.

As for the biblically predicted big bang creation model,²⁶ all these new dark matter particle findings and the prospects for future dark matter particle discoveries are consistent and anticipated by the big bang creation models. Big bang models that permit the possible existence of physical life predict a specified quantity of dark matter where the dark matter is comprised of particles, a quantity that is consistent with astronomers’ best measurements.²⁷ These findings provide further scientific demonstration that the more we learn about the universe, the more evidence we discover for the intentional, supernatural handiwork of the Being beyond the universe who created and designed it.

Endnotes

1. Hugh Ross, “Candidates Compete for Top Billing among Cosmic Particles,” Reasons to Believe (June 1, 2011); Hugh Ross, “Have the Real ‘God Particles’ Been Found? Part 1 (of 4),” Reasons to Believe (January 24, 2011); Hugh Ross, “Have the Real ‘God Particles’ Been Found? Part 2 (of 4),” Reasons to Believe (January 31, 2011); Hugh Ross, “Have the Real ‘God Particles’ Been Found? Part 3 (of 4),” Reasons to Believe (February 7, 2011); Hugh Ross, “Have the Real ‘God Particles’ Been Found? Part 4 (of 4),” Reasons to Believe (February 14, 2011).
2. Hugh Ross, “Neutrino Breakthroughs: More Evidence for Cosmic Creation and Design,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, January 3, 2022.
3. Masahiro Ibe, Alexander Kusenko, and Tsutomu T. Yanagida, “Why Three Generations?” Physics Letters B 758 (July 10, 2016): 365–369, doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2016.05.025.
4. A. A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al. (MiniBooNE Collaboration), “Significant Excess of Electronlike Events in the MiniBooNE Short-Baseline Neutrino Experiment,” Physical Review Letters 121, no. 22 (November 30, 2018): id. 221801, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.221801.
5. C. Athanassopoulos et al., “Candidate Events in a Search for ν_mu → ν_e Oscillations,” Physical Review Letters 75, no. 14 (October 2, 1995): id. 2650, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.75.2650; A. Aguilar et al. (LSND Collaboration), “Evidence for Neutrino Oscillations from the Observation of ν_e Appearance in a ν_mu Beam,” Physical Review D 64, no. 11 (December 1, 2001): id. 112007, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.64.112007.
6. Joachim Kopp, “The Plot Thickens for a Fourth Neutrino,” Physics 11 (November 26, 2018): id. 122, doi:10.1103/Physics.11.122.
7. G. Mention et al., “Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly,” Physical Review D 83, no. 7 (April 291, 2011): id. 073006, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.83.073006.
8. F. P. An et al. (Daya Bay Collaboration), “Measurement of the Reactor Antineutrino Flux and Spectrum at Daya Bay,” Physical Review Letters 116, no. 6 (February 12, 2016): id. 061801, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061801.
9. Esra Bulbul et al., “Detection of an Unidentified Emission Line in the Stacked X-Ray Spectrum of Galaxy Clusters,” Astrophysical Journal 789, no. 1 (June 2014): id. 13, doi:10.1088/0004-637X/789/1/13.
10. A. Boyarsky et al., “Unidentified Line in X-Ray Spectra of the Andromeda Galaxy and Perseus Galaxy Cluster,” Physical Review Letters 113, no. 25 (December 19, 2014): id. 251301, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.251301; Kevork N. Abazajian, “X-Ray Line May Have Dark Matter Origin,” Physics 7 (December 15, 2014): id. 128, doi:10.1103/Physics.7.128.
11. Gianpiero Mangano et al., “Relic Neutrino Decoupling including Flavour Oscillations,” Nuclear Physics B 729, nos. 1–2 (November 21, 2005): 221–234, doi:10.1016/j.nuclpjysb.2005.09.041.
12. N. Aghanim et al. (Planck Collaboration), “Planck 2018 Results VI. Cosmological Parameters,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 641 (September 2020): id. A6, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201833910.
13. Hugh Ross, “Cosmic Creation Model Passes Key Helium Abundance Test,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, July 8, 2019; Hugh Ross, “New Deuterium Measurements Bolster Big Bang Cosmology,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, December 28, 2020; Hugh Ross, “Is Lithium a Problem for the Big Bang Creation Model?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, February 20, 2017.
14. Aghanim et al. (Planck Collaboration), “Planck 2018 Results.”
15. Matthew Adams et al., “Direct Comparison of Sterile Neutrino Constraints from Cosmological Data, ν_e Disappearance Data and ν_mu → ν_e Appearance Data in a 3 + 1 Model,” European Physical Journal C 80, no. 8 (August 19, 2020): id. 758, doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-8197-y.
16. Eleonora Di Valentino, Stefano Gariazzo, and Olga Mena, “Most Constraining Cosmological Neutrino Mass Bounds,” Physical Review D 104, no. 8 (October 15, 2021): id. 083504, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.104.083504.
17. P. Abratenko et al. (MicrorBooNE Collaboration), “Search for an Excess of Electron Neutrino Interactions in MicroBooNE Using Multiple Final State Topologies,” (October 29, 2021), arXiv:2110.14054.
18. H. Almazán et al. (STEREO Collaboration), “Improved Sterile Neutrino Constraints from the STEREO Experiment with 179 Days of Reactor-On Data,” Physical Review D 102, no. 5 (September 1, 2020): id. 052002, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.102.052002.
19. Andrea Caputo, Marco Regis, and Marco Taoso, “Searching for Sterile Neutrino with X-Ray Intensity Mapping,” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2020, no. 03 (March 2, 2020): id. 002, doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2020/03/001.
20. S. Aiello et al. (KM3NeT Collaboration), “Sensitivity to Light Sterile Neutrino Mixing Parameters with KLM3NeT/ORCA,” Journal of High Energy Physics 2021, no. 10 (October 21, 2021): id. 180, doi:10.1007/JHEP10(2021)180.
21. Ross, “Candidates Compete for Top Billing.”
22. Jin Wang, “Constraints of Axions from White Dwarf Cooling,” Modern Physics Letters A 7, no. 17 (June 7, 1992): 1497–1502, doi:10.1142/S0217732392001166.
23. J. Isern et al., “Axions and the White Dwarf Luminosity Function,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 172 (June 2009): id. 012005, doi:10.1088/1742-6596/171/1/012005; Georg G. Raffelt, Javier Redondo, and Nicolas Viaux Maira, “The meV Mass Frontier of Axion Physics,” Physical Review D 84, no. 10 (November 15, 2011): id. 103008, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.84.103008.
24. J. Isern et al., “Axions and the Luminosity Function of White Dwarfs: The Thin and Thick Discs, and the Halo,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 478, no. 2 (August 2018): 2569–2575, doi:10.1093/mnras/sty1162.
25. Sebastian Hoof, Joerg Jaeckel, and Lennert J. Thormaehlen, “Quantifying Uncertainties in the Solar Axion Flux and Their Impact on Determining Axion Model Parameters,” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2021, no. 9 (September 6, 2021): id. 006, doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2021/09/006.
26. Hugh Ross and John Rea, “Big Bang—The Bible Taught It First!” Reasons to Believe, July 1, 2000; Hugh Ross, “Does the Bible Teach Big Bang Cosmology?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, August 26, 2019.
27. Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, 4th ed. (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2018), 50–53, 72–76.

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Famed physicist Enrico Fermi coined the term neutrino, which in Italian means “little neutral one,” to distinguish it from the more massive particle, the neutron. Neutrinos are elementary particles that interact only with gravity and the weak nuclear force. They are electrically neutral and possess a rest mass that is so tiny that—until a few decades ago—it was thought to be zero. Because the weak nuclear force has a very short range and the gravitational interaction is extremely weak, neutrinos typically pass through normal matter unimpeded and undetected.

Neutrinos are the most abundant known massive particles in the universe. On Earth’s surface, the majority of incoming neutrinos come from the Sun. They arrive on Earth’s surface at a rate of 65 billion neutrinos per second per square centimeter. Weak nuclear force interactions create neutrinos in three different leptonic “flavors” (types): electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos.

Neutrino Masses
Since more than one flavor or type of neutrino exists and neutrinos can oscillate from one type to another, neutrinos cannot possibly be massless particles. This recognition has profound implications for both cosmic creation and particle creation models. Consequently, both astronomers and particle physicists have launched a quest to measure the masses of the three different types of neutrinos and to determine if there is the possibility that a fourth type of neutrino exists.

Measuring the individual masses of the different neutrino types is technologically extremely challenging. However, the measurement of the total mass of all the individual neutrino types (electron + muon + tau + mass of a possible fourth type of neutrino) is coming within researchers’ reach. To test cosmic and particle creation models, astronomers and particle physicists only need to know the total mass of all individual neutrino types. Though an accurate measurement of this total mass has eluded researchers, they have been able to determine a lower and upper limit to this mass. This exciting quest has occurred over the past few years, and especially the past few weeks. Scientific progress has brought the upper limit close enough to the lower limit to establish which of the many cosmic and particle creation models are correct.

I’ll explain the technical details so you can see how these remarkable measurements came about. If it’s too technical, feel free to skim the next few sections and glean what you can. Then, pick it up again at “Implications for the Standard Particle and Cosmic Creation Models.”

Minimum Neutrino Particle Masses
The neutrino oscillations that have been observed in numerous experiments¹ establish two possible minima for the total mass of all the individual neutrino types. In the case where one of the three neutrino types possesses mass and the other two do not (known as the normal hierarchy), then the total minimum mass of the three neutrinos = 0.05885 ± 0.00044 electron volts (eV).² Where two of the neutrino types possess mass and the third is massless (known as the inverted hierarchy), then the total minimum mass of the three neutrinos = 0.10000 ± 0.00068 eV.³ For comparison the rest mass of an electron = 511,000 eV.

Particle Physics Measurements of Maximum Neutrino Particle Masses
The mass measurement that best constrains cosmic and particle creation models is the maximum possible total mass of the three neutrino types. Hence, both particle physicists and astronomers have worked diligently to establish as low an upper limit to this total mass as their instruments will allow.

Using a tritium beta decay experiment, a team of particle physicists known as the Troitsk Collaboration determined that the total mass of the three neutrino types could not be any greater than 2.5 eV.⁴ A similar experiment by the Mainz Collaboration established an upper mass limit of 2.2 eV.⁵

In 2019, the KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) analyzed the spectrum of beta-decay electrons from a high-purity gaseous molecular tritium source. This analysis yielded an upper mass limit for the three neutrino types of 1.1 eV.⁶ In future experimental runs the KATRIN team will achieve a measuring sensitivity down to 0.2 eV.⁷

Astronomical Measurements of Maximum Neutrino Particle Masses
Cosmological data sets provide an independent measure of the upper mass limit of the three neutrino types, measurements that prove to be much more constraining. The properties of dark energy affect the total mass of the three neutrino types. This mass also determines the free-streaming nature of neutrinos, which impacts the large-scale structure of galaxies and galaxy clusters in different ways at different times in the history of the universe.

Based on the 2018 Planck map of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the radiation remaining from the cosmic creation event), a team of three theoretical physicists established an upper bound on the total mass of the three neutrino types for the normal hierarchy = 0.156 eV and for the inverted hierarchy = 0.185 eV.⁸ The Planck Collaboration of 181 astronomers and physicists established an upper limit = 0.12 eV for both the normal and inverted hierarchies.⁹ Adding an analysis of transversal baryon acoustic oscillation data, a team of four astronomers placed an upper bound limit of 0.11 eV.¹⁰ Based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey—IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), a team of 98 astronomers determined an upper bound limit of 0.099eV, which degraded to 0.114 eV with the addition of gravitational lensing data on distant galaxies.¹¹

A few weeks ago, three physicists published the most constrained upper limit to date on the mass sum of the three neutrino types.¹² Their improved limit was achieved thanks to their addition of analyses of the latest surveys of redshift space distortions and luminous red galaxies. Their upper mass limit = 0.087 eV at a 95% confidence level, which means that with a 95% probability we can be certain that the mass sum of the three neutrino types must be less than 0.087 eV.

Implications for the Standard Cosmic and Particle Creation Models
Astronomers now have a measured mass limit—at a 95% confidence level—for the sum of the three neutrino types that is 0.013 eV below what is required for an inverted hierarchy. This measurement does not eliminate the inverted hierarchy model, but it does make it highly unlikely.

The new constraints on the mass limit for the sum of the three neutrino types imply a slightly smaller value for the amount of dark matter in the universe. They also imply a slightly larger value for the average cosmic expansion rate, aka the Hubble constant.

That the sum of the three neutrino types’ mass lies between 0.05841 and 0.087 eV implies a growth rate for the spatial structure of the universe’s mass that is consistent with the temperature and polarization maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation. It is also consistent with general relativity explaining the dynamics of galaxies and galaxy clusters throughout the universe. This consistency provides even more evidence for the ΛCDM (Lambda cold dark matter) cosmic creation model; that is, for a big bang creation model where the most dominant component of the universe is dark energy and the second-largest component of the universe is cold dark matter. As I explained in two previous articles,¹³ more than 2,500 years before astronomers even had a hint that the universe arose from a big bang creation event, the Bible described the cosmos in terms that align with the four most fundamental features of big bang cosmology.

The cosmological observations that produced the best constraints on the sum of the three neutrino types’ mass also produced yet more evidence for the fine-tuning of the constant or constants governing dark energy. As one team of astronomers wrote in their paper published just a few months ago, “This fine-tuning represents a theoretical difficulty without any agreed-upon resolution and one that may not be resolvable through fundamental physics considerations alone. This difficulty has been substantially sharpened by the observations presented here.”¹⁴ The difficulty of accounting for such fine-tuning of the constant(s) governing dark energy that they write about is an intractable problem only for nontheistic models of the universe. For the God of the Bible it is no problem to fine-tune a cosmic parameter to better than 1 part in 10¹²² to make advanced life in the universe possible.

*In next week’s Today’s New Reason to Believe article I will describe the latest measurements constraining the possible existence of a fourth neutrino type and the philosophical implications of these measurements.

Endnotes

1. K. Abe et al. (T2K Collaboration), “Observation of Electron Neutrino Appearance in a Muon Neutrino Beam,” Physical Review Letters 112, no. 6 (February 14, 2014): id. 061802, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.061802; J. K. Ahn et al. (RENO Collaboration), “Observation of Reactor Electron Antineutrinos Disappearance in the RENO Experiment,” Physical Review Letters 108, no. 19 (May 11, 2012): id. 191802, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.191802.
2. Shouvik Roy Choudhury and Steen Hannestad, “Updated Results on Neutrino Mass and Mass Hierarchy from Cosmology with Planck 2018 Likelihoods,” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2020, no. 7 (July 2020): id. 037, doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2020/07/037I; Ivan Esteban et al., “Global Analysis of Three-Flavour Neutrino Oscillations: Synergies and Tensions in the Determination of θ₂₃, δ_CP, and the Mass Ordering,” Journal of High Energy Physics 2019 (January 2019): id. 106, doi:10.1007/JHEP01(2019)106.
3. Choudhury and Hannestad, “Updated Results on Neutrino Mass”; Esteban et al., “Global Analysis.”
4. V. N. Aseev et al. (Troitsk Collaboration), “Upper Limit on Electron Antineutrino Mass from Troitsk Experiment,” Physical Review D 84 (December 11, 2011): id. 112003, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.84.112003.
5. Christine Kraus et al., “Final Results from Phase II of the Mainz Neutrino Mass Search in Tritium β Decay,” European Physical Journal C—Particles and Fields 40 (April 2005): 447–468, doi:10.1140/epjc/s2205-02139-7.
6. M. Aker et al., “Improved Upper Limit on the Neutrino Mass from a Direct Kinematic Method by KATRIN,” Physical Review Letters 123, no. 22 (November 25, 2019): id. 221802, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.22180.
7. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, KATRIN: Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment, accessed November 1, 2021, https://www.katrin.kit.edu.
8. Ming Zhang, Jing-Fei Zhang, and Xin Zhang, “Impacts of Dark Energy on Constraining Neutrino Mass after Planck 2018,” Communications in Theoretical Physics 72, no. 12 (December 1, 2020): id. 125402, doi:10.1088/1572-9494/abbb84.
9. N. Aghanim et al. (Planck Collaboration), “Planck 2018 Results. VI. Cosmological Parameters,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 641 (September 2020): id. A6, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201833910.
10. Rafael C. Nunes et al., “Cosmological Parameter Analyses Using Transversal BAO Data,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 497, no. 2 (September 2020): 2133–2141, doi:10.1093/mnras/staa2036.
11. Alam Shadab et al., “Completed SDSS-IV Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological Implications from Two Decades of Spectroscopic Surveys at the Apache Point Observatory,” Physical Review D 103, no. 8 (April 28, 2021): id. 083533, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.103.083533.
12. Eleonora Di Valentino, Stefano Gariazzo, and Olga Mena, “Most Constraining Cosmological Neutrino Mass Bounds,” Physical Review D 104, no. 8 (October 2021): id. 083504, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.104.083504.
13. Hugh Ross and John Rea, “Big Bang—The Bible Taught It First!,” Facts For Faith (Quarter 3, 2000), 26–32; Hugh Ross, “Does the Bible Teach Big Bang Cosmology,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog) Reasons to Believe, August 26, 2019.
14. Shadab et al., “Completed SDSS-IV Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey,” 28.

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