On March 21, 2013, the European Space Agency (ESA) published a new image of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, generated from data collected by the Planck space telescope. Big Bang cosmologists interpret the CMB to be "left-over" radiation from a time about 380,000 years after the alleged Big Bang.¹ These are the highest resolution images of the CMB to date.

What should an astronomer think of a galaxy with tremendous mass but very few stars? Karl Gephardt of the University of Texas in Austin and his colleagues studied one recently, and he said, "This is a really oddball galaxy…. It's almost all black hole."¹

Sorting fact from fiction when it comes to outer space can be tricky, especially when scientists assert that certain stellar features are real when they are not. Why should school textbook authors, or the students and teachers that rely on them to deliver accurate information, trust these scientists' more speculative assertions when they routinely name structures that don't exist?