Dark Energy may be load of old cobblers shock report
Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 9:45 am
New Scientist issue 2646...
Just mentioning this because it might interest some of you. Dark energy is apparently the explanation for why the universe seems to be expanding much faster than predicted by various theories, however a vocal minority of cosmologists (Thomas Buchert of Lyon University, Yurij Baryshev of St. Petersburg State University and others) have come up with an alternative which does away with the need for the dark energy explanation altogether.
Because it's all rather neat, it seemed like it might be worth describing here.
Gravity (resulting from mass) slows time - this has been proven with atomic clocks flown around the globe in the upper atmosphere. Therefore it sort of follows that very large objects (such as galaxies) slow time down quite a lot. Anyway, the persons named above (or others) have weighed the galaxies (sort of), done the maths, and concluded that large areas of cosmic void* (ie - areas where there is little significant mass to cause time to slow) may be 18.6 billion years old relative to the slow-time mass-heavy parts of the cosmos which should be only 13.7 billion years old (or 14.7 billion according to David Wiltshire of Canterbury University, NZ), so if true it means our universe is subject to a time distortion (roughly) 4 billion years across, and the expansion is happening as predicted, only our view of it is distorted because we're actually looking at different times. So much for dark energy!
*: Seems like the problem with this idea is an argument over what constitutes void.
Just mentioning this because it might interest some of you. Dark energy is apparently the explanation for why the universe seems to be expanding much faster than predicted by various theories, however a vocal minority of cosmologists (Thomas Buchert of Lyon University, Yurij Baryshev of St. Petersburg State University and others) have come up with an alternative which does away with the need for the dark energy explanation altogether.
Because it's all rather neat, it seemed like it might be worth describing here.
Gravity (resulting from mass) slows time - this has been proven with atomic clocks flown around the globe in the upper atmosphere. Therefore it sort of follows that very large objects (such as galaxies) slow time down quite a lot. Anyway, the persons named above (or others) have weighed the galaxies (sort of), done the maths, and concluded that large areas of cosmic void* (ie - areas where there is little significant mass to cause time to slow) may be 18.6 billion years old relative to the slow-time mass-heavy parts of the cosmos which should be only 13.7 billion years old (or 14.7 billion according to David Wiltshire of Canterbury University, NZ), so if true it means our universe is subject to a time distortion (roughly) 4 billion years across, and the expansion is happening as predicted, only our view of it is distorted because we're actually looking at different times. So much for dark energy!
*: Seems like the problem with this idea is an argument over what constitutes void.
