I am republishing a post by Patrice Ayme!
But first I want to publish a comment left by me on Tuesday morning.
This is (marginally) beyond my intellect. But I understood sufficient to be amazed by the incredible facts of the vastness of space.
We live just far enough away from the nearest town so that the electric lights do not interfere with the night sky.
When we have a clear moonless night I stand on our rear deck and look up at the stars and become lost, in the sense that I do not think, in gazing and gazing and g….. and g…. and ..
The vastness of space!
Now to the article.
ooOOoo
Abstract: Modern cosmological theories of the 2010s are incredibly precise. Those Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛLCDM) theories have a problem: the acceleration of the expansion of the universe computed in our cosmic neighborhood disagrees with the acceleration of the expansion computed using what is viewed as the early universe. It is a question of 73 locally versus 68 early on. But these are accelerations…
Only SQPR has something deep to say about this situation, because in that theory “Dark Energy” augments with time (so the local Hubble constant should be higher than any old one…) .
***
In the first half of the 20C a number of European and US astronomers, including Hubble, a lawyer turned astronomer using the world’s most powerful telescope (in California), established that the universe was expanding. Isolated galaxies, and giant clusters of galaxies, were observed to separate from each other. When Hubble announced the expansion (which had been guessed by some of his European colleagues), he got a number that was so high that the universe was younger than the Sun. That was corrected by Baade, a German astronomer.
***
DARK MATTER:
Meanwhile, in 1933 Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss at Caltech, studying the giant Coma cluster of more than 1,000 galaxies, saw that they were moving too fast for the observed mass, and announced Dunkle Materie, Dark Matter. Nobody liked that, and ignoring it was facilitated by what was viewed as Zwicky’s insufferable, eccentric personality (as all people of exceptional intellect). Fritz also coined the term “supernova” while fostering the concept of neutron stars.(Zwicky also pushed for “Tired Light” theory (which SQPR predicts)… what was viewed as a major irritant by the Big Bangists…)
A generation later, Vera Rubin, an astronomer at Carnegie, confirmed after studying 60 galaxies and Andromeda with a state of the art spectrometer, that, well, the galaxies rotated too much like plates (and not just like vortices)… confirming Zwicky’s Dark Matter. She was not ignored, although a woman and a mother to boot. A major observatory coming on line at high altitude in the Atacama desert bears her name. It’s not called the Zwicky. Maybe Zwicky should have claimed to be a woman?
***
DARK ENERGY:
Dark Energy is the name given to whatever is causing the accelerating expansion of the universe. Here’s a quick presentation of what We (Sort of) Know:
In the late 1990s, astronomers studying distant supernovae discovered that the universe’s expansion is speeding up, not slowing down. This was unexpected—gravity, a constant force towards the center of mass (whatever that is!) should be pulling everything together, slowing the expansion down. Something must be pushing it apart (another explanation -not usually considered- would be that gravity weakens over ultra-cosmological distances… as SQPR would have it).
That “something” supposedly pushing galactic clusters apart, is what we call Dark Energy. It’s not directly observed, but, like many things in science, inferred from its effects. How Much of the Universe Is It?
According to the reigning current models (like Lambda-CDM), the universe is roughly: 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter… and 5% regular matter (you, me, stars, planets, etc.)
***
What Might Dark Energy Be? There are a few theoriescharacterized by a parcimony of imagination:
Cosmological Constant (Λ) – Einstein originally added this to his equations of general relativity. It represents a constant energy density filling space uniformly. Einstein put it in to prevent the equation representing gravitation in the universe to collapse the universe gravitationally. As a prima donna, he later claimed that to be his “greatest mistake”, as otherwise he, Einstein The Great Again, would have “predicted” the expansion of the universe. In any case, the Cosmological Constant (Λ) explains nothing, it’s just a description of behavior (but supposes a few things one may be able to contradict)..
Quintessence – Turning the constant Λ into a dynamic field, evolving over space and time.
Modified Gravity – Maybe gravity doesn’t work quite the way we think on cosmic scales, and we don’t need a “dark energy” at all. The problem is that the “official” MONDs (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) were devised to explain Dark Matter in galaxies… But they failed.
***
The only proposed theory that is not just a description of behavior, is SQPR, Sub Quantic, Physical Reality.y Is Dark Energy So Weird:
The energy density of dark energy stays constant (or nearly so), even as the universe expands.
This means more space = more dark energy, which further accelerates expansion.
In SQPR this is directly explained by the weakening of gravity as the carrier bosons are ripped apart…Because the Quantum Interaction is not of infinite range…
***
73 – 68 = 5… 5 km/s per Megaparsec…Let’s meditate on this. Over a billion years, if we have two objects the distance of which augments at 15,000 km/s. It turns out that affects severely the famed high precision of the age of the universe… which I always took with a bucket of salt…
A higher Hubble constant affects key cosmic stats — assuming a flat universe with ΛCDM (standard model). These numbers are approximate and based on best-fit ΛCDM calculations — exact values depend on details like matter/dark energy density. The difference might not seem huge in light-years, but in cosmology, even a 5% shift is massive — it changes how we model the early universe, galaxy formation, and fundamental physics.
Hubble Constant (H₀) 67 km/s/Mpc (Planck satellite): Age of Universe ~13.8 billion years; Radius of Observable Universe ~46.5 billion light-years; Diameter ~93 BLY
At the higher 73 km/s/Mpc ( from Local data), the age of the universe is only ~13.0 billion years, the observable radius ~43.8 billion light-years, its diameter, ~87.6 BLY
***
Astronomy has long led towards new physics. F = ma, the crucial “2nd law” of mechanics was discovered by Buridan, circa 1340 CE, by mentally exploring what happened to a falling body (I read Buridan directly and made that conclusion myself). Then Buridan suggested that his first law (no force, no change of impetus; implicitly considers them to be vectors) implied that planets would keep rotating indefinitely… Then of course there was the synthesis in the 17C from Kepler to Newton… Observing the satellites of Jupiter and their twenty minute delay when they are the furthest from Earth, gave the speed of light..
Supposing that the Quantum Interaction which teleports quantum states does so at finite speed, gives Dark Matter and Dark Energy….
Is a very simple modification… but quite at odds from the way physicists learn Quantum Physics.
Anyway, the mildly called “Hubble Tension” is turning into the “Hubble Crisis”. Good, With enough crises, we may get somewhere…
Patrice Ayme
Please contemplate below with what the scandal started, the Coma Cluster of 1,000+ galaxies… Zwicky computed that the visible mass would have to be multiplied by 400 to hold the cluster together…
ooOOoo
The absolute vastness of space!
Learning from Dogs 