RINGS, COMETS, AND DYING STARS
Saturn, like Jupiter, of course has rings. And like the rings of Jupiter, the fragments in Saturn's rings are colliding and causing the rings to disperse. The rings are dissipating. Were Saturn billions of years old, it should be ringless. Saturn also has moons that are significant chronometers. For example, Titan has an atmosphere, yet were Titan billions of years old, its atmosphere should have been lost before now.
Other planets besides Jupiter and Saturn have rings. Uranus' rings were first photographed by the Voyager 2 space craft in 1986. Like the rings of Jupiter, the rings of Uranus are very sharply defined, and like the Jovian rings, the Uranian rings should not exist, because collisions of material in the rings would have destroyed the rings over billions of years.
Comets shed light on the age of the solar system. Comets contain material that vaporizes when they pass close to the sun. The vapors trail behind the comet, forming a tail that is highly visible from earth. A comet like Halley's comet can make roughly 200 passes by the sun before losing all of its vaporizable material. One pass, one orbit, takes typically seventy or eighty years -- comet Halley with a 76 year orbit is typical. This means a typical comet will lose all of its vaporizable material after 200 orbits of 70 to 80 years each. We can say then that the "typical" comet has a lifetime of 15,000 years or so, after which the comet will have no tail and will be invisible to us on the earth.
How is it that comets are still visible if the solar system is really billions of years old? Clearly the solar system must in fact be young, but evolutionary philosophy "saves" the old age by teaching that there must be an external source of comets on the fringes of the solar system. The story goes that comets occasionally enter the solar system from this "fringe" material -- a cloud of debris called the "Oort cloud" which allegedly surrounds the solar system. But no one has ever observed this Oort cloud. Like any other thing people believe in but cannot observe, the Oort cloud idea is outside the realm of science. It is strictly an evolutionary idea made to explain away the young age of comets.
Cosmic dust also indicates that the solar system is young. This dust reflects sunlight back to earth, and this reflected light is most noticeable (under a clear sky) an hour after sunset or an hour before sunrise. But if the solar system were very old the dust should have been pulled into the sun by now and the reflected sunlight would not exist.
Outside the solar system, certain stars -- technically designated O stars and B stars -- are relatively short lived, lasting only a few million years. If the universe is really billions of years old, how is it that these stars are so plentiful? If the solar system and universe were truly old, these short-lived stars should not exist. The idea that stars are continuously "born" in "stellar nurseries" is strictly an evolutionary idea, however, made to explain away this evidence of youth. Genuine star formation has never been observed. All so-called stellar formations are really speculative deductions based on evolutionary presuppositions. In fact, all actual observations of stellar changes involve instability and explosions. For example, many stars have been observed to undergo massive explosions called "supernovas." The only changes observed in stars are destructive ones of this sort.
After a supernova explosion, there remains a vast cloud of gas and debris called a "nebula." Outer space is littered with these nebulas. In all cases where astronomers have monitored the motion of gases in a nebula, the gases have been found to be expanding away from the center of an explosion, never contracting to form a new star. For example, the Crab Nebula, a vast cloud of gas and debris surrounding the site of a stellar explosion of 1000 years ago, is found to be moving away from the center of its explosion at very high speed -- thousands of miles per hour.
Outside the Milky Way Galaxy, there are other processes showing the universe is young. Globular clusters contain up to several million stars, and they are spreading apart. Were the cosmos billions of years old, the clusters should not exist. On an even larger cosmic scale, many galaxies contain well-defined spiral arms. The spiral arms should have ceased to exist were the galaxies billions of years old.
We conclude that evidence supporting the vast eons of evolutionary time does not really exist. There is no physical process that validates evolutionary chronology. On the positive side, many chronometers demonstrate the validity of Biblical chronology. They show that the creation is only a few thousand years old, a conclusion that is consistent with the Biblical date of creation.