The universe might become weak if the light were tired and the physical constants changed

When the James Webb Space Telescope began collecting data, it gave us an unprecedented view of the distant universe. The faint redshift galaxies that Hubble saw as just specks of light were revealed as objects with structure and shape. And astronomers ran into some problems. Those are the oldest galaxies He looked very developed and very old Formed during the accepted timeline of the universe. This sparked a flurry of articles boldly claiming that JWST had disproved the Big Bang. Now a new article in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society He argues that the problem is not that the galaxies are so advanced, but rather that the universe is twice as old as we thought. 26.7 billion years to be exact. It’s a bold claim, but does the data really back it up?

The model proposed in the paper begins with something known as tired light. In the tired light model, the light automatically loses its energy over time. So when photons travel billions of light years through the universe, they are redshifted. Thus, the light of distant galaxies is redshifted not by cosmic expansion, but by the inherent redness of the light over time. The idea of ​​a tired light has been around since Edwin Hubble first noticed the cosmic expansion as a way to maintain the idea of ​​a stable state of the universe. Lost popularity like Evidence for cosmic expansion has become clear, He regained some popularity when Webb’s notes began to appear.

We’ve long known that tired light doesn’t work on its own, so this paper adds a new twist in dealing with universal physical constants. Quantities such as the speed of light, the charge of an electron, or the gravitational constant seem to be built into the structure of the universe. They have the values ​​they do because of the way the universe was formed, and they are generally assumed not to change over time. We have geological and astronomical observations that show that physical constants have not changed for at least several billion years.

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But this new paper argues that if you combine fading light with shifting physical constants, you can get a universe that appears smaller than it actually is. Basically, the strained light gives you the cosmic redshift you’re observing, and the gradual shifting of physical constants means that these mature, distant galaxies are not only 100 million years old, but billions of years old. By tweaking tired light and shifting physical constants Thus only To match the data, you get a universe 26.7 billion years old.

Does the model work? Yes, but there are two problems with that. The first is that Disk theories are weak theories. While this model can be made to fit observational data, there is no material motivation to do so. There are a lot of models that can be tweaked to fit the data, and this is not the same as having a robust physical model. The author of the work argues that there could be an underlying mechanism causing tired light and physical constants to shift in the right way, but there is still a lot of manipulation involved in the model.

The second problem is that the JWST observations do not exclude a standard 13.7-billion-year-old universe. Galaxies are more complex than some computer simulations have predicted, but this is not surprising given the limitations of models of large structures. There are many ways early galaxies could have evolved so quickly that they don’t require a rewriting of cosmology.

But even without a strong financial incentive to create this model, the work is still worthwhile. It’s the kind of Paper that thinks outside the box, and it’s a great way to make sure we’re not locked into old paradigms just because they’ve worked so far. This new paradigm is unlikely to overturn standard cosmology, but as long as ideas are testable and refutable, as they are in this model, there is no harm in adding them to the pile of ideas.

reference: Gupta, R.;JWST Early Observations of the Universe and CDM Cosmology. ” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2023): stadium2032.