no dark matter, and twice as old

From the «but is it flat?» department:
Feed: Slashdot
Title: Physicist Claims Universe Has No Dark Matter and Is Twice As Old As We
Thought
Author: BeauHD
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2024 06:00:00 -0400
Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/03/20/0651255/physicist-claims-universe-has-no-dark-matter-and-is-twice-as-old-as-we-thought?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: Sound waves fossilized in the maps of
galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that
took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. Last year,
theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada
published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe's currently accepted
age is a trick of the light, one that masks its truly ancient state while also
ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces. Gupta's latest analysis
suggests oscillations from the earliest moments in time preserved in large-scale
cosmic structures support his claims. "The study's findings confirm that our
previous work about the age of the Universe being 26.7 billion years has allowed
us to discover that the Universe does not require dark matter to exist," says
Gupta. "In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the Universe is said
to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature
as it expands, not due to dark energy." [...] Current cosmological models make
the reasonable assumption that certain forces governing the interactions of
particles have remained constant throughout time. Gupta challenges a specific
example of this 'coupling constant', asking how it might affect the spread of
space over exhaustively long periods of time. It's hard enough for any novel
hypothesis to survive the intense scrutiny of the scientific community. But
Gupta's suggestion isn't even entirely new -- it's loosely based on an idea that
was shown the door nearly a century ago. In the late 1920s, Swiss physicist
Fritz Zwicky wondered if the reddened light of far distant objects was a result
of lost energy, like a marathon runner exhausted by a long journey across the
eons of space. His 'tired light' hypothesis was in competition with the
now-accepted theory that light's red-shifted frequency is due to the cumulative
expansion of space tugging at light waves like a stretched spring. The
consequences of Gupta's version of the tired light hypothesis -- what is
referred to as covarying coupling constants plus tired light, or CCC+TL -- would
affect the Universe expansion, doing away with mysterious pushing forces of dark
energy and blaming changing interactions between known particles for the
increased stretching of space. To replace existing models with CCC+TL, Gupta
would need to convince cosmologists his model does a better job of explaining
what we see at large. His latest paper attempts to do that by using CCC+TL to
explain fluctuations in the spread of visible matter across space caused by
sound waves in a newborn Universe, and the glow of ancient dawn known as the
cosmic microwave background. While his analysis concludes his hybrid tired light
theory can play nicely with certain features of the Universe's residual echoes
of light and sound, it does so only if we also ditch the idea that dark matter
is also a thing. The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

[image 2][2] [image 4][4]

Read more of this story[5] at Slashdot.

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