cosmology|According to an alternative theory, the forces of nature may weaken.
Dark matter has been an important part of the study of the universe in recent decades. According to the prevailing theory, there is five times as much dark matter compared to ordinary matter, which is what everything visible is made of.
However, the search for a dark matter particle is difficult. Its properties are unknown.
It apparently doesn’t feel the electromagnetic force, but it probably obeys gravity. Some invisible mass holds galaxies and clusters of galaxies together. Visible matter is not enough to explain their movements.
But what if there is no dark matter? Researcher at the Canadian University of Ottawa Rajendra Gupta presents published by The Astrophysical Journal in the studythat dark matter is not needed to explain the phenomena of the universe.
Prevailing cosmological theories are based on the assumption that the Constants of the universe have remained unchanged.
Gupta’s model is different. According to him, natural forces in the universe weaken over time. Light also loses energy as it travels through space.
Gupta explains the expansion of the universe in terms of changing natural constants rather than dark energy.
In addition Gupta seeks to explain the James Webb Space Telescope’s observation that very early galaxies appear larger and brighter than previously thought possible.
The standard model of cosmology has a hard time explaining how these galaxies managed to grow so large so soon after the Big Bang.
According to Gupta, the universe is older than the current theory. Then the early galaxies have more time to grow and the problem goes away.
The disappearance of dark matter from the model is, as it were, a by-product. In the current model, measurements of the microwave background radiation accurately tell the amount of dark matter.
Gupta eliminates dark matter to explain the properties of microwave radiation.
In the colored image, two clusters of galaxies collide. Part of the mass of the so-called Bullet Cluster is dark matter (blue). It was detected using the gravitational lensing effect. The gravity of dark matter refracts light from objects behind it.
Helsinki docent of theoretical physics at the university Matti Heikinheimo is not yet convinced of Gupta’s thoughts.
According to him, it is typical for alternative theories of dark matter that they focus on explaining a selected observation, but ignore other observations that support the assumption of dark matter.
“The strength of the dark matter hypothesis is that dark matter explains numerous seemingly independent observations. These include, for example, the properties of microwave radiation in space, the formation of galaxies and galaxy groups, and the movements and temperature of galaxies and galaxy groups,” says Heikinheimo.
Guptan the theory is related to the century-old “tired light” hypothesis, proposed by a Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky In the late 1920s.
The idea was that the redshift of the light of distant objects might be due to the fading of light over millions and billions of light years. Redshift means that the wavelength of the light gets longer on the way, i.e. the light becomes redder.
The “fatigue” of light would be due to photons colliding with particles and losing their energy. Light that has lost its purity has ended up as a side plot of cosmology. Instead, the concept dark matter invented by Zwicky in the 1930s became established.