- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.world
New research puts age of universe at 26.7 billion years, nearly twice as old as previously believed::Our universe could be twice as old as current estimates, according to a new study that challenges the dominant cosmological model and sheds new light on the so-called “impossible early galaxy problem.”
You must log in or register to comment.
deleted by creator
Yeah, I’m not convinced, either. It seems like every couple of years, someone puts out an announcement that Lambda CDM is dead, other scientists take a look, and a much quieter announcement correcting their work gets put out.
What about what the CMB tells us? Theory seems to ignore that entirely. I’ll wait for the cosmic neutrino background before I take any of these articles more seriously.
Interesting hypothesis – and totally outside my wheelhouse. I wonder how “tired light” sheds energy without violating the law of conservation of energy. Are they suggesting that our universe is not an isolated and closed system?
No, nothing like that. Everything is within our universe. He says he has a new way of describing light where it loses energy over time (something weird) and so it explains redshift. His idea says the redshift is wrong and the universe is older. He also says universal constants can change (something never observed before that would fundamentally change physics) and he can explain dark matter.
So, a lot of over-the-top claims. I’m pretty sure this guy isn’t toppling physics today as the bar is set high for whatever evidence he is sharing.
He says he has a new way of describing light where it loses energy over time (something weird) and so it explains redshift.
From what I understand, the main idea behind tired light isn’t particularly weird, it’s just that scattering could potentially lead to a redshift as well. The issue is that if you assume enough scattering to explain cosmological redshift you would also get some other effects, which are however not observed. This basically ruled out the original tired light theory by Zwicky from the beginning. The author of this paper seems to try to get around that by combining a smaller amount of “tired light” with time-varying couplings. Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall and I can’t tell any more details.
He also says universal constants can change (something never observed before that would fundamentally change physics)
No, he says that coupling constants (not sure if that is what you mean by “universal constants” or not) can change, which is a generic consequence of the RG and has in fact been observed in nature (e.g. electron charge or strong coupling, to name just the most famous examples). From a QFT perspective, the cosmological constant is also a coupling, and several quantum gravity theories do in fact generically predict or suggest a time-varying cosmological constant. So this part by itself isn’t really that out there, nor that original for that matter. However, since I can’t access the paper I can’t judge whether the author’s way of varying Λ is reasonable or just a way to fit the data without any physical motivation, and I don’t really know what the article means by “he proposes a constant that accounts for the evolution of the coupling constants”.
and he can explain dark matter
That seems like a more grandiose claim to me, if accurate. Do you have a source for where the author claims that? Although he wouldn’t be the first to do so.
I’m pretty sure this guy isn’t toppling physics today as the bar is set high for whatever evidence he is sharing.
I think this can be said for a lot of popular science article with topics like this. However, in many cases the blame can lie more with the pop-sci journalists who are looking for a cool story and might over-interpret the author’s claims (I guess “physics toppled!!!11” sounds more interesting than “some guy suggests that some data might be fitted in a slightly different way”). Although in this case at least the age of the universe claim does seem to come from the author.
Edit: Judging by another article of the author someone else linked me to further down, it seems that while the author does speak of coupling constants, he really does refer to time-varying fundamental constants. So I must agree with the previous poster on this, it does seem quite a bit more out there than I had originally assumed.
Isn’t dark matter just matter we can’t percieve? Rogue asteriods and the like? I admit its been a minute since I studied this stuff, but dark matter isn’t very special.
Are there any constants that we actually know to have varied along the lifetime of the universe?
I don’t know if this counts as a constant, but I read that time moved something like 5 times slower in the early years of the universe.
It didn’t as time is relative just like space. There is no absolute standard of time to say “time moves faster”. Faster relative to what?
It used to be 13.7 billion years± a big margin that got narrowed down to 13.8± a smaller margin. Not seeing that changing unless there’s something seriously wrong with the previous research.
Narrowing it based on what we can measure doesn’t mean it’s correct.
The deeper we have stared into the universe the more our base understandings have challenged.
Before Hubble and also before JWST scientists predicted these telescopes would :
Hypothesis : show evidence of the beginning of the universe at about 14 billion years.
Observations again and again nulifies that hypothesis.
Scientist goes over the top about this in part because they have :human needs
need to publish, need to make a career, need to be recognized as scientists, need to put bread on the table
And so they come up with this :
BigBang, acceleration of the expansion : “inflation of the universe”, decceleration : “end of the inflation”, and now a new phase of acceleration !
Since there is not enough strong non-contradictory evidence to say otherwise, let’s go with Ocam’s razor : whatever more simple theories, even if it hurts scientist’s egos.A sincere thank you for a fascinating, quality post in Technology instead of the usual Threads/Twitter/Reddit posts.
