Claim CE261.1:

The Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud have never been observed. They have been proposed merely as an ad hoc explanation for a source of comets.

Source:

Brown, Walt, 1995. In the Beginning: Compelling evidence for creation and the Flood. Phoenix, AZ: Center for Scientific Creation, p. 69.

Response:

  1. As of June 2000, more than 250 objects in the Kuiper Belt have been observed directly (Buie 2000), and it alone can be the source of short-term comets.

    The Oort cloud has not been observed directly (although Sedna, a planetoid discovered in March 2004, might be in the Oort cloud), but its presence is well supported based on observations of long-period comets.

  2. If there were no source for new comets to come from, all comets would have the same age. They do not. Some are young and have lots of gasses; others are little more than gravel heaps.

Links:

Matson, Dave E. 1994. How good are those young-earth arguments? http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/howgood-yea.html#proof3

References:

  1. Buie, Marc W. 2000. A deep ecliptic survey for Kuiper Belt objects. NOAO Newsletter 62 (June 2000), http://www.noao.edu/noao/noaonews/jun00/node2.html

Further Reading:

Jewitt, David. n.d. Kuiper Belt. http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~jewitt/kb.html
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created 2003-4-22, modified 2004-3-19