“Houston, we have a problem. All the Population III stars are missing. Maybe there is a God.”
Theories of origins have always fascinated me, especially because they involve so many unresolved problems that still need to be explored. Of course, some theories are more believable than others. The theory of gravity has been confirmed by experimentation. The theory of relativity, although hard to understand, has also been verified. The Big Bang theory, however, only has limited scientific support, and some big problems. One very obvious problem that we have to deal with is that we should see “old” stars, and they just aren’t there to be found.
Now, in spite of my opening sentence, belief in God is not incompatible with the Big Bang. Many people consider the Big Bang as proof that God created the universe. It’s just that it would make life simpler for me if cosmology supported the six-day creation of Genesis 1. That way, I wouldn’t need to stretch the words of the Bible to accommodate facts. In spite of my religious prejudice, I try to look at all the facts objectively and accept where they go. So I examine red shift and background radiation, but also P3 stars and dark matter. We don’t have the final answer yet, which is what makes it so interesting.
It’s not really that difficult to understand the star problem. I’ll try to make it simple. According to the Big Bang theory, hydrogen should have formed quickly and easily after the Big Bang because of the attraction between positive and negative particles. Hydrogen is the simplest atom. The first stars should have consisted of hydrogen and helium and nothing else. We call these Population III stars. Moreover, we should be able to see the most distant P3 stars, because their light would have been traveling across the universe all this time. The fact that we can’t see them means that the theory of the Big Bang needs to go back to the drawing board. We need more answers.
What about all the stars that we do see? What are they? We call them Population I and Population II stars because they have heavy metals that cannot be produced within a star. Their existence contradicts the laws of physics. Another theory says that “old” Population III stars explode in a supernova to create metals and then come back together into Population II stars. All the stars we see have heavy metals within them, so we have to scratch our heads and ask, “How did they get there?” There shouldn’t be any “new” stars if there aren’t any “old” stars.
Until we discover a slew of old stars, I’m just going to suppose that God made all the stars the way they are now, all containing complex atoms, such as uranium. That’s a lot simpler to believe than a theory that lacks scientific support.