Some of you who don’t know my history may be unaware that for many years I was pretty active in the skeptic movement. This was a loosely organized group of thousands of people who tried to promote critical thinking to the public, with varying results (and, I must note, with varying methods I, um, wasn’t wholly supportive of).

But at the time I did a lot of writing and giving talks debunking various chuckleheaded conspiracy theories involving science and astronomy. This includes people who think the Apollo Moon landings were faked, Geocentrists, evolution deniers, climate change deniers, and so on.

Young-Earth creationists were pretty active back then, and you couldn’t mention a fossil without one popping up to talk about how Satan buried them or they were fake or or or. They had a lot of arguments based on their gross misinterpretation of science, and it was rather fun to poke holes in them. Most of them were pretty straightforward.

One that caught my eye was the claim that astronomers predicted there should be thousands of old supernova remnants, yet none were known. The idea here is that the universe is young, according to them, so no old remnants could exist. Also the claim was trying to just erode trust in astronomy.

What’s the real science? When a star explodes, it blasts out an octillion tons or so of debris into space, which expand away at several million kilometers per hour. This expanding material, called the remnant, glows brightly at first, but dims over time as the material cools. The Crab Nebula is one such remnant, just shy of a millennium old, and even at 6,500 light-years distant can be spotted with binoculars. There are many others, of course.

But, as the YEC’s claimed, there should be older ones too, older than 6,000 years, yet none is seen!

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Even at the time that claim was baloney. Plenty of remnants older than 10,000 years were known. However, it is true that fewer were known than you’d expect from simple extrapolation of how often they’re created. At least a thousand should exist, but only about 300-400 had been confidently identified. There are a few reasons for that; as they age they fade rapidly, of course, and the gas in them mixes with the ambient gas in the galaxy, making it difficult to spot them.

Though they dim in visible light, however, they still emit radio waves. The expanding debris carries a magnetic field, and charged subatomic particles get trapped by the fields and spin around the field lines, creating what’s called synchrotron radiation, primarily at radio wavelengths. Radio telescopes are pretty sensitive and can detect this emission even when it’s faint, and, bonus, radio waves can make it through the muck lying between the stars that blocks visible light, so this is a great part of the electromagnetic spectrum in which to search for any elusive old remnants.

A team of astronomers has done just this. Two radio surveys are being done using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, a huge collection of radio dishes in Oz; called EMU (Evolutionary Map of the Universe) and POSSUM (Polarization Sky Survey of the Universe’s Magnetism) — I love the Aussie sense of humor — these surveys are quite good at finding old remnants. The astronomers present a catalog of remnants they detected [link to journal paper].

44 were previously known, and 46 were previously known candidates (that is, not confirmed as remnants; the new surveys did confirm eight of them, though). They also found six new remnants and 37 more new candidates! Nice. Extrapolating from these, they expect to find about 400 total when the surveys are complete, half of which will be new.

That goes a long way to closing the gap between predicted and observed remnants! And this only covers the sky visible from Australia, so there are certainly more remnants lying hidden in the northern hemisphere as well. It may yet be there are still fewer seen then predicted, but that will likely mean the predictions are based on assumptions that may not be wholly accurate. That’s how science works; when observations don’t fit hypotheses, you examine both to make sure you’re doing things right, but especially your working ideas on what you expect to see. 

Either way, this shows — GASP — young-Earth creationists are wrong, and the universe is quite old. Those are both conclusions I’ve come to that have been shown to be correct over and over again. It’s the way to bet, and I’d bet a lot.

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