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."
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."
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.
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.
Hence the "unless there's something seriously wrong with the previous research" part. That is always a possibility, of course, but it's much less likely that is the case then that this single study is the thing that is wrong.
Somewhat. Based on my understanding of current astronomy news (I'm not an astronomer, just interested in the field) it's not proven, but it's not entirely disproven either. For instance, my understanding is that the Hubble constant (rate of expansion of the universe) is different if measured with the Cosmic Microwave Background (newer universe) compared to measuring redshirt of stars (older universe). Of course, it could be that one of the measurements made an assumption that's not true, but i don't think it's out of the question that the false assumption ends up being that the constant stays the same over time...
Take what I say with a grain of salt, though. Hopefully an actual astronomer can pitch in
"Hubble constant" is a misnomer, and an old fashioned term. Cosmologist actually use the term "Hubble parameter" (which is in general time dependent except in very specific models which only contain dark energy), and denote its present value as H0.
According to my understanding, yes. For example, it is usually assumed that there was a period of time shortly after inflation when matter was in a quark-gluon plasma, which would imply a larger strong coupling than today, since a small strong coupling is associated to confinement. There was also the electroweak-epoch, during which the electromagnetic and weak interactions were unified, and the corresponding gauge bosons were massless. The masses of the W and Z bosons can thus also be regarded as time-varying, as well as the electron charge. However, it should be noted that these changes are not all that significant on the cosmological scales under investigation here (e.g. the quark epoch ended at about 10-6 seconds after the big bang, which is much much less than the age of the universe, and it's assumed that it still took quite a while before the first stars formed). A time-varying cosmological constant could potentially be much more relevant (and some quantum gravity theories even predict it), and I've heard some people suggesting it as a potential solution for the H0 tension. However, I unfortunately can't access the paper and assess what precisely the author did there, and whether it is in any way similar to what I just mentioned.
What you're talking about is the energy dependence of the coupling constants, which is a phenomenon that is very well understood theoretically, and also checked in experiments. The early universe was much hotter, and thus particles had much more kinetic energy and "felt" slightly different coupling constants. The neat thing is that, since this is a purely energy-dependent effect, we can recreate the conditions of the early universe: the collisions at LHC have an energy of the order of 1 TeV, which corresponds to a temperature of 1016K, the temperature 10-12 s after the Big Bang. Anything after the first 10-12 s we can directly recreate, and from 10-12 s to about 10-30 s-ish we can more or less reliably extrapolate. And of course this is all included in the standard Lambda-CMD cosmology.
Although the article is behind a paywall (which is somewhat strange in cosmology, but I digress), you can check other articles by the same author that also use the "varying constants" framework, for example https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11667. His framework is that the speed of light c, the Planck constant h, the Boltzmann constant k and the Gravitational constant G depend directly on time, or to be more precise, on the expansion factor of the universe. There are two big differences with respect to what you were saying:
c, h and k are not coupling constants, and therefore they don't receive any energy-dependent corrections. In fact, you could think of these constants as "conversion factors" between units: c converts space-time coordinates in seconds to space-time coordinates in meters, k converts kinetic energy in Joules (or electronvolts) to kinetic energy in Kelvin, and h converts angular momentum or action measured in quanta to angular momentum or action measured in J·s (or eV·s). Honestly it doesn't make much sense to me that these constants could change (what does it means, in physical terms), that they could change in a correlated way, or that they could change in a correlated way to one, and only one, coupling constant, G.
Since this is a time-dependent change, there is no real way to significantly test the hypothesis (unlike the energy-dependent changes). We can not go back in time, or to wait to a different time when these constants would be different. He actually proposes to study how the experimental determinations of these constants in the last 10-20 years, which sounds very wild, as those tiny differences are very susceptible, by definition, to experimental uncertainties, and they are not very suitable for controlled tests.
“Feels” and “common sense”means little in science unless you have a mathematical or logical reason why you feel that way. I’ve seen far too many metaphysical theories try to be taken seriously to not point out that “feels” is useless, observation and math are what matter
And yet, some of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time were made based on people’s feelings and intuition. Fucking shocker I know right. I’ll bet you’re fun at parties.
Well, it would be most logical for it to have existed forever.
For the last 13.7 billion years, we haven't observed matter/energy just popping into existence. In all that time, nothing was truly created from scratch.
So, it would be quite the exception to the rule, if that was different beforehand...
Double that is still weird. If the heat death of the universe is 10^100 years out or more, we're incredibly early whether it's 13 billion or 26 billion. That leads to one possible explanation for the Fermi paradox, the universe will have countless civilizations rise and fall over the eons, we're just one of the first, if not the first.
Granted that's just a thought that came to mind under the influence of an unexpectedly strong edible rather than actual scientific research, but it's still neat.
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.