Fossilized sound waves in maps of galaxies across the universe can be interpreted as signs of the Big Bang that occurred 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest.
Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta of the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the currently accepted age of the universe is a trick of light, a proposal that hides its truly ancient state while also ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces.
Gupta's latest analysis suggests that oscillations from the first moments in time preserved in large-scale cosmic structures support his claims.
“The study results confirm that our previous work on the age of the universe at 26.7 billion years has allowed us to discover that the universe does not need dark matter to exist.” He says Gupta.
“In standard cosmology, the accelerating expansion of the universe is said to be caused by dark energy but it is actually due to weak forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy.”
Rewind the currently accepted models of accelerating expansion, and the vacuum of space would have stopped being so empty around 13.7 billion years ago, when every piece of matter in the universe was confined to a volume you could now fit in your top pocket with room to spare.
This was all well and good until measurements of what were thought to be fresh galaxies revealed a universe that seemed surprisingly mature for massive cosmic objects that haven't even been taken out of ovens for a billion years.
This leaves astronomers with a dilemma – either current models about the evolution of galaxies and black holes need to be modified, or the universe has, in fact, been around for much longer than we think.
Current cosmological models make the reasonable assumption that some of the forces governing particle interactions have remained constant all along. Gupta challenges a specific example of this “conjugation constant”He wonders how this might affect the spread of space over very long periods of time.
It is difficult enough for any new hypothesis to survive intense scrutiny by the scientific community. But Gupta's proposal isn't entirely new, being loosely based on an idea that was shown the door nearly a century ago.
In the late 1920s, Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky wondered whether red light from distant objects was the result of lost energy, like a marathon runner exhausted from a long journey across eons of space.
for him 'Tired lightThe hypothesis was competing with the now accepted theory that the red-shifted frequency of light is due to the cumulative expansion of space attracting light waves like a stretched spring.
The consequences of Gupta's version of the tired-light hypothesis—what is referred to as variable coupling constants plus tired light, or CCC+TL—would affect the expansion of the universe, eliminating the mysterious driving forces of dark energy and blaming variable interactions between known particles. To increase the expansion of space.
To replace current models with CCC+TL, Gupta will need to convince cosmologists that his model does a better job of explaining what we see overall. His recent paper attempts to do this using CCC+TL for explanation Fluctuations in the spread of visual matter Across space caused by sound waves in the newborn universe, the ancient glow of dawn known as the cosmic microwave background.
While his analysis concludes that his hybrid light theory can play nicely with certain features of light and sound echoes remaining in the universe, it only does so if we also abandon the idea that dark matter is also a thing.
Of course, not having to explain the origins of dark matter or dark energy would make physics a little easier in some ways. Whether CCC+TL is up to the task of turning cosmology upside down will depend on whether it can solve more problems than it creates.
For now, our universe remains 13.7 billion years young, even if it has a few alien skeletons in its closet.
This research was published in Astrophysical Journal.
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