Tag: Riley High School

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Measuring the Distance to Stars

Measuring the Distance to Stars

Measuring the distance to stars is not as hard as you might think. As an earth science teacher at Riley High School in South Bend, Indiana, I enjoyed seeing a student’s eyes light up when they came to understand some scientific fact. They had thought it was beyond them, and suddenly it made sense. Knowing the distance to a star was always one of those facts. Let me show you how easy it is:

Look at a picture on the other side of the room. Hold your finger in front of your face and close one eye. Line up your finger and the object on the wall. Now close that eye and open the other eye, Does your finger appear to jump? If you drew a line between your eyes and extended a line from each eye to the picture, you would have a triangle. The apex angle at the picture is controlled by how far away it is from you. If you do the same experiment with an object that is closer, there will be a different angle.

The illustration on the right shows the Earth making its yearly orbit around the Sun. A line from the Earth to the Sun will establish a triangle. In six months, it will look like objects at the apex angle have moved. How much they will have moved depends on how far away they are. My classes do simulations of these measurements on the football field, and it becomes apparent how easy measuring the distance to stars can be.

The measurement unit astronomers use is based on how far away a star must be for the angle at the apex to be one arcsecond. We call that distance one parsec, and it is 3.26 light-years. If the parallax angle is .5 seconds of arc, the star must be 6.52 light-years away. The smaller the angle, the farther away the object is. The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which has been underway since 2013, can measure the parallax angle to a millionth of a second of arc. Objects that move such a small amount are tens of thousands of light-years away.

The cosmos is much larger than most of us can imagine. The light we see from some of those stars left the stars hundreds of thousands of years ago. Measuring the distance to stars gives new meaning to passages like Isaiah 40:22: “He stretched out the heavens as a curtain and spread them out as a tent to dwell in.”

If it has taken the light from the stars God created many tens of thousands of years to get here, it is evident that the creation didn’t happen a few thousand years ago. Verses describing the process of creation are untimed and undated. Let us not allow human traditions to challenge the integrity of the Bible. God created time, and He certainly is not limited by anything He created.

— John N. Clayton © 2020

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50th Anniversary of Apollo 11

50th Anniversary of Apollo 11Every once in awhile, I get to sit back and think about what I have witnessed in my life’s journey. A reminder of one of the highlights of that journey is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

My time of being involved in scientific events of significance began when I was fortunate enough to win the Westinghouse National Science Fair competition for Bloomington, Indiana, in 1954. That program allowed me to spend a few days with some of the top scientists in the country. I got to hear about what they were doing and what lay ahead in their particular disciplines. I was a high school junior at the time and totally entrenched in atheism. I believed that I had two choices. I could reject all of science and immerse myself in the senseless traditions (as I saw them) of religion. The choice I preferred was to be an atheist and participate in the wonderful possibilities of the future molded and made possible by science.

The most distressing part of the National Science Fair was that several of the best-known scientists of that day both publicly and privately expressed belief in God. My science teacher named Wayne Gross at University High School in Bloomington was a man of deep conviction that God was the creator of all things. He believed that science was just a way of understanding what God had done and using that knowledge to improve the lot of all humanity. The seeds of doubt in the religion of my parents (atheism) had been sown.

Many years later, as a science teacher at Riley High School in South Bend, Indiana, I sat glued to the television on July 20, 1969. I was watching Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they traveled to the Moon, landed on it, and returned with massive amounts of data and samples. I had left atheism and started my ministry just a year before the Moon landing, and I had been encouraged and tutored by many people in the space program.

As a teacher, I was able to attend numerous meetings with all of the scientists who contributed to that incredible accomplishment. I was even allowed to give a lectureship at the Space Center in Houston, which was attended by a large number of the people involved in the Apollo success. The man who introduced me at that lectureship was the man in charge of the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) from the time it left the mother ship until it returned. He began the program by suggesting that there would be those who would think that I would be talking to a group of atheists since nearly everyone there was involved in a scientific way with the Apollo program. He then asked everyone who worked in the program to stand, and virtually everyone in the room stood. He then asked everyone standing who believed in God to sit down, and only four people remained standing. I know there are all kinds of objections to that action, but it underlined the fact that as Dr. Frank Baxter has said: “The more we know of the creation, the closer we get to the creator.” We don’t have to put our brain in park to be a Christian.

July 20, 2019, is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 moon landing, and we are talking about returning to the Moon. Morgan Stanley estimates that the net worth of the United States space economy by 2040 will be 1.1 trillion dollars (Astronomy magazine, July 2019, page 19). There are good reasons, both politically and economically, to go to the Moon and on to outer space. As we do so, one lesson we must in mind is that every discovery we have made in space has supported the biblical record. Science and faith have a symbiotic relationship in space as well as on Earth. All of this goes beyond astronauts reading Genesis 1 as they orbited the Moon.
— John N. Clayton © 2019