Do heavily cratered planets and moons demand an old age for the solar system?
[8/99 DRAFT – Rev 3/2001] Solar System Evolution theories assume the sun and planets formed over 4.5 billion years ago. In the next 600 million years or so heavy cratering of the solar system is said to have occurred from the debris left over from the original formation process. In a few more hundred million years the cratering rate had tapered off, leaving the solar system largely as we see it today. What alternatives do “young-age” creationists have for such a scenario? One alternative is that an interstellar cloud of comets and asteroids passed through the solar system producing catastrophic cratering of the planets, their moons, and existing asteroids and comets [1, 3, 5, 6]. In recent years NASA has discovered that today there are microscopic-sized interstellar dust particles passing through the solar system, but nothing large-scale; so this speculated Creationist scenario would have been a one-time widespread catastrophe affecting the entire solar system only thousands of years a
