What is their credibility in what they say astronomers and astrophysicists?

Birth and death of stars, formation of the Milky Way, meeting other galaxies and so on. With images stalled or frozen in our time scale.|||They all based on speculations and mathematical models necessarily embedded in the scientific literature of the Bible as well as the evangelical Bible contains many untruths. If you spend years reading the Bible scientific, or leave converted and becoming repeater old theories, or will leave believing that lost a lot of time reading by reading scientific gibberish.|||The answer is more than will fit on a little web page(!) All I can say is that their credibility lies in hundreds of years of study, countless thousands of experiments, papers, books, arguments and discussions.





Fortunately, all of this information is publicly available!





Unfortunately, you can't suck it all into your head in 5 minutes. I know that's hard to hear in an age where people expect knowledge and opinions to be acquired and formed instantly But, to appreciate the credibility of astronomers and astrophysicists, I'm afraid there's little alternative but to do it the old fashioned way--study. I recommend you start by taking an astronomy class at your local community college (I think you'd enjoy it).|||Their credibility is based on centuries of documented and peer-reviewed efforts. Asking for evidence of credibility in this forum is sort of difficult, as it would involve years of study. No one can provide that credibility with a few pictures and some well-chosen words. It takes hard work to even understand what is being discussed. If you want evidence of credibility, I would recommend a trip to the nearest university library. There are stacks of physical journals that will occupy your attention for an extended time. Your skepticism is well-warranted; there is nothing wrong with skepticism. However, you should certainly take the time (and it will be a significant time) to really understand what it is you are being skeptical about.|||Any astronomer can point a telescope at a tiny patch of sky and see whether what a previous astronomer said was there. This is the ultimate transparency.


Images are taken with cameras for a very long time, and digital cameras for at least 20 years (yes, digital cameras were invented for astronomical use), and any astronomer can verify an old image by ensuring the same object is there in a new image.


All this is, of course, one astronomer backing up what another astronomer sees, so if you have a basic lack of credibility for what astronomers say at all (as is implied in your question) then you aren't going to believe what any of them say anyway. It's all probably a conspiracy, right?





But integral to the theories that scientists come up with for the history of the universe is the speed of light, which means that the further away something is, the longer the light has taken to reach our eye or camera.


Light from the Sun takes 8 minutes and 19 seconds to reach us. We don't know what is happening at the Sun this very second. We can only tell what it was like 8 minutes and 19 seconds ago. As casual observers, it is easy to feel like what we are seeing is what is happening "now", but really it is only an echo of a previous truth.


The light from stars in the sky takes at least 4 years to reach us. We don't know that any particular star is still there "now" because the light that left it 4 years ago is only now reaching us. If it has exploded since, we won't know about it until the light, or absence of light, reaches us.





Our galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter, so the light from a star at the far side will have taken almost 100,000 years to reach us. No scientist can prove, therefore, that the other side of the Galaxy is still there. We have to assume that it is.





So while you are right that from our single viewpoint, we can only get a limited understanding of the processes at work in the universe, because there are at least 200 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and we can get "still" shots of stars of similar types that seem to fit together into a rational framework, and build up a pretty good picture of the life cycles of many types of stars. We can even cross-reference measurements taken in different wavelengths. And some stars have a measurable variation in brightness. Others have an orbiting companion star which influences overall apparent brightness.





That isn't all we can tell about the stars and galaxies though. By measuring the qualities of the light of stars, we can determine whether they are blue-shifted or red-shifted. Blue means they are approaching us, and red means they are receding from us.





Similarly, there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, so a "simple snapshot" coupled with an analysis of the light will tell us quite a bit.


For example, the Andromeda galaxy looks pretty, and is well documented by astronomy. It has a trillion stars, and is slightly more massive than our own galaxy. It is also hurtling towards us at more than 100 kilometers per second. It's still going to take 2.5 billion years to reach us, though, because it is also 2.5 million light years away. If you'd like to wait, you'll be able to get the only first hand evidence we're likely to get that galaxies really do collide. But until then, all we can say for sure is "From this picture, it sure *looks* like these two galaxies are colliding..."





We can't say that the Andromeda Galaxy still exists, or any other thing in the universe whose light washes over us on a clear night, but we *can* say that astronomers are scientists who use rational thought and the scientific method to try to make sense of the universe around us. While science sometimes gets it wrong, like with the old Earth being the centre of the universe thing, astronomy is one discipline where the evidence is shining freely down on rival research groups, which is the surest way to ensure transparency in any field.|||Their credibility is very simple: All and none. Because they are scientists, they can only say, what can be proven by experiments and reproduced. So, they have no special authority behind their word to say, that they say the truth, but anybody who is interested can check their claims.|||OK, Mr. Level 1 troll: we can see star and galaxy evolution in its various stages, since there are many examples across the sky. And we can connect them, using what we know of physics. Many of these processes can be modelled by computer, in a way that makes their connection to physics clear.