cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/1721793
The article introduces a dynamic cosmological constant in the current ΛCDM cosmological model to account for some data from the James Webb telescope. The new model would have the age of the universe at ~27 billion years.
This is interesting. Unfortunately some popular science magazines are already presenting it as a fact…
That’s really interesting! I read the abstract but I don’t really follow exactly what it is they’re proposing (and I don’t really expect I would follow even if I tried to work my way through the actual paper). It’ll be interesting to see whether other astronomers and astrophysicists take up this new model or not in the coming years though!
This article gives a slightly more understandable and not too sensationalistic summary: https://phys.org/news/2023-07-age-universe-billion-years-previously.html
This is yet another attempt by Big Bang skeptics to make a fringe alternative theory (“tired light”) relevant.
Physicists have been pointing out the flaws in this theory for nearly 100 years. Given the overall success of the Big Bang model, I’m betting on “or not”.
I basically have a layman’s perspective here, but just based on the abstract this particular paper doesn’t seem to be challenging the idea of a cosmological constant or the big bang as a thing that happened. Looking at the author’s other works it seems like he’s pretty big on the idea that the values of physical constants may have changed over time, which it seems like is basically his argument here too?
I’ll admit, though, I’ve not heard the phrase “tired light” before this morning, so maybe it’s enough of a red flag to discard the work out of hand. I don’t know.
If a mathematical model has no constants then it can describe any dataset…
