In 1998, three men Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess made a discovery that the universe was not only expanding but that this expansion was increasing.[i] Now this is shocking as one would think that after the Big Bang, the universe would slow down its expansion as it was this initial explosion that caused the expansion to begin with. Logic would dictate that the mass of the universe and the gravity associated with this mass would cause the universe to shrink. Just like throwing a rock into the air, gravity would eventually cause the rock to fall towards the Earth after gravity has overtaken the acceleration of the rock. So why doesn’t this seem to be happening to our universe? Why is the expansion increasing? I don’t believe that this accelerating expansion actually is happening. In fact, I think scientists have come to the wrong conclusion and I will explain why
First, however, let’s look first at how these men discovered the accelerating expansion.
Since we can’t go out into the universe and physically measure the speed at which an object is moving, something else needs to be used. In this case, the three men used a technique that is called, “Redshift” to determine the relative speed of objects moving in the universe. “Redshift” is when you look at an object that is giving off light and is moving away from you the light will start to look redder the faster it is moving away from you. If a star is moving towards the Earth, it will look bluer instead of red. This is like the Doppler Effect that gives you that distinct change in sound when a car comes at and then passes you. In the case of the Redshift, it is light that changes. By looking at specific bright stars and measuring their Redshift, scientists can determine if that star is moving away from the Earth faster or slower than a star in another part of the universe. That is what these three men did. They took measurements of supernovae (exploding stars that are very bright) and compared them to each other and found that the deeper they looked into the universe (that is, the farther away), the faster these supernovae were moving away from the Earth. Thus they came up with the notion that the universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating!
Now this is a very logical and well thought out thesis, however, they haven’t factored in the fact that the deeper you look in the universe, the further back in time you are seeing. Light takes its time to get from stars that are light-years away. If a star is roughly twenty light-years away, it takes roughly twenty light years for us to actually see that light. Even though I have argued that light is not limited to the Speed of Light (roughly 300,000 km per second), the visible light that humans can detect moves at the Speed of Light and takes time to reach us, just like it takes eight minutes for visible light to reach our eyes from the Sun. What we see in the night sky is an historical view of the universe, not the current way it exists. This is incredibly important to remember and needs to be factored into any theory that relies on observing stars and supernovae. This wasn’t done in when these three men came up with their theory that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. This is the fatal flaw in their theory.
When you look further and further into the night sky, you look further and further back in time, so what these three men are actually observing is the slowing down of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
I know that may seem confusing but think about it; the farthest we can see with the most powerful telescopes is billions of light years from Earth. This means we are looking billions of years into the past. Back then it would have been closer to the Big Bang and closer to the event that caused the massive expansion of the universe. The stars that we see from that time would be seen as getting farther away, faster than ones closer to us because expansion would have slowed down due to gravity, thus slowing down the stars closer to us. As you pull back the telescope to closer and closer stars, you end up closer and closer to our current time period and with it, a slowing down of the expansion.
I know that this flies in the face of a theory that was so good that it won the Nobel Prize but if you value logic then this current theory is flawed. It’s flawed because it ignores what teachers have been telling students for years; the starlight you see in the night sky is from a long time ago and could be from a dead star that hasn’t shone in years. I think it is time that we either completely trash the theory that it takes time for starlight to reach the Earth so that the theory of the accelerating expansion of the universe can work or we trash the theory the accelerating expansion of the universe theory. Both cannot be correct.
No comments:
Post a Comment