Rethinking Red Shifts, Expansion of the Universe, and Dark Matter

David Noel

A radical rethink of the implications of the red shifts observed in the light from distant cosmic objects leads to a model of the Universe which is much simpler and more consistent than that currently accepted. In this model, the Universe is not expanding, and the so-called Dark Matter does not exist. The Hubble Constant is replaced by a simple formula based on routine physical calculations.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble [1] found that characteristic spectral lines in the light from distant galaxies were shifted towards the redder, lower-energy end of their spectra, and that these shifts were greater for more distant galaxies. Astronomers traditionally have interpreted the red shift as a Doppler shift induced as the galaxies recede from us within an expanding universe.

The 'Hubble Constant' is an empirically-derived parameter in an equation expressing the relationship between the distance of a galactic light source from us and the speed of recession of the source. While there are numerous difficulties in determining the value of this parameter, it hardly qualifies as a constant. Currently-accepted values differ by some 30%, which is not an indication of a fundamental constant of the universe.

According to Stephen Hawking [2], light is red-shifted as it moves away from a gravitational source, as verified in a terrestrial experiment conducted in 1962. In the 'Placid Universe' model (PU model) proposed here, redshifts in light from galactic sources are essentially due to energy losses in overcoming the accumulated gravitational drag of the fields they pass through. Because the speed of light is fixed, these energy losses show up as an increase in wavelength, that is, a shift towards red.

So in a 'Placid Universe', individual galaxies or galactic groupings are not moving away from each other, and spectral redshifts are the accumulation of energy losses in light caused by passing through gravitational fields. If the gravitational field was uniform throughout the universe, then 'Hubble's Constant' would have an exact value, with the redshift directly reflecting the distance travelled. In the real world, matter and hence gravitational fields are aggregated, so the actual redshift observed in light from a given source will depend on the energy losses accumulated as the light travels through the varying gravitational fields between source and observer.

Evidence supporting the PU model comes from observations by William G Tifft of the University of Arizona and others that redshifts are 'quantized' [1], that is, the observed values tend to cluster around multiples of a base number which, in the Expanding Universe (EU) model, would correspond to an expansion speed step of about 12 kilometres per second. Tifft's work started in the early 1970s.

Subsequent work by Sandra Faber and her colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, starting in 1991 [3], provided much more detail on this. With their DEEP project (Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe), the UCSC team built up a picture of a 'lumpy' universe, with the red-shift data aggregated into cells, walls, and voids in any cross-sectional view out from the observer.

It is hard to find any reason for this clustering of expansion speeds implied in the EU model. In the PU model, however, this clustering is a natural consequence of the fact that matter in the universe is aggregated into galaxies, and the redshift quantization number merely reflects the number of galaxies or galactic clusters between source and observer.

There is a difference between the EU and PU models which can be tested. If a distant galactic source is truly expanding away from the observer, the redshift values observed for two different lines in its spectrum must be absolutely identical, as they reflect its Doppler movement. In the PU model, the gravitational braking might be slightly different for different wavelengths, resulting in slightly different shifts for the two lines.

There is a simple mathematical treatment which might apply here. Using Einstein's mass/energy equivalence equation, E=mc², the light observed in a spectral study can be treated as an equivalent mass, and its deceleration and energy loss as the mass travels through a gravitational field can be calculated routinely. This energy loss can then be back-converted to a wavelength reddening.

This treatment gives a physical basis to the PU test just mentioned. Two different masses travelling together through a gravitational field would be expected to lose the same proportion of their energy, not a fixed amount of energy. Two different spectral lines would equate to different equivalent masses, and so their absolute energy losses should be different.

Dark Matter
The suggestion of the existence of 'dark matter' to explain observational data is a classic contravention of Occam's Law, that we must not postulate the existence of any new entity unless there is no possible alternative [4].

In our Solar System, movement of the planets occurs in close conformity with Newton's gravitational laws, according to which the rates of movement around the Sun are slower for planets further out. When this behaviour is extrapolated up to apply to distant spiral galaxies, it is natural to assume that these, also, would show slower rates of movement in spiral arms further from the centres of the galaxies.

It was therefore a surprise when measurements by the astronomer Jan Oort in the late 1920s indicated that orbital velocities of stars in the Milky Way do not decrease with increasing distance from our galactic centre. According to Johnson [5], in 1933 Fritz Zwicky noted the same behaviour in galaxies forming galactic clusters, and suggested that it was due to unidentified 'dark matter' which 'balanced out' the masses at the centres of galaxies.

The same effect was confirmed in more modern work. In 1970 Vera Rubin and W K Ford [5] found the same behaviour in the neighbouring Andromeda Nebula, and later found the same behaviour in over 60 other spiral galaxies. All these measurements were based on Doppler redshifts, and all were taken to confirm the existence of dark matter throughout the intergalactic space observed. However, to date no direct observation of any dark matter has been made.

In the simple PU model, the universe is not expanding, and our galaxy and other galaxies are not rotating. This model fits the observed facts much better than the EU model. The implication is that, for whatever reason, gravitational behaviour on the solar system scale cannot be just scaled up to galactic and intergalactic scales unchanged.

Explanations for this can be offered, but the validity or otherwise of these explanations does not affect the Occam's Law approach, which baldly rules out inventing an entity like dark matter to explain a phenomenon which is not observed.

The PU approach is not new. In the very early 1930s, the British astronomer Sir James Jeans pointed out [6] that reddening of light could occur for a number of reasons, including the 'gravitational pull of stars and nebulae'. Interestingly, he refers to work by Dr [Fritz] Zwicky of the California Institute, and others:

"Dr Zwicky ... has suggested that still another cause of reddening may be found in the gravitational pull of stars and nebulae on light passing near them -- the same pull as causes the observed bending of starlight at an eclipse of the sun ... to test this suggestion , ten Bruggencate has examined the light from a number of globular clusters, all at about the same distance from us, but so selected that the amount of intervening gravitational matter varied greatly ... light from these shewed a reddening, and if this were caused by the expansion of space, it ought to have been the same for all the clusters ... actually it was much more nearly proportional to the amount of intervening matter, exactly as required by Zwicky's theory, and its actual amount agreed well enough with that predicted by the theoretical formula".

Galaxies NOT rotating
The first reaction to the suggestion that galaxies and galactic clusters are not rotating may well be: "If these entities are not rotating about their gravitational centres, why wouldn't they just collapse inward?

This belief can be seen to be defective by considering the whole universe, clearly subject to the same constraints as its constituent galaxies. We have no evidence that the universe has a gravitational centre to rotate about -- if it had, it would have outer boundaries -- and so the universe must be held from collapsing by its intrinsic nature. This applies whether or not we know the details of the forces involved.

In fact, the "Dark Matter" which was postulated to explain rotational anomalies as above may be merely the known matter existing to infinity outside any particular galaxy considered.

Finally, the mathematical astronomer's glory-hole provided by the Big Bang, with its attendant facets of Inflation, Deflation, and the like, is just so complex, unwieldy, and balanced on a theoretical knife-edge as to be of itself improbable. A scientist interviewed on the television presentation 'Stephen Hawking's Universe" [7] claimed that the existence of the whole universe depended on some empirical parameter which had to be exactly as it was, to an accuracy of 15 decimal places. Any variation from this, it was stated, and we would not exist.

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References

[1]. (David A Plaisted): Red Shift Riddles. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/redshift.html.
[2]. Stephen W Hawking: A Brief History of Time. Bantam Books, London, 1989, pp. 35, 90, 97.
[3]. Andrew Phillips & Nicole Vogt: Probing the Evolving Universe. Beam Line, Fall 1997, pp. 29-35. Available at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/beamline/27/3/27-3-phillips.pdf.
[4]. William of Occam (died 1347): "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter neccesitatem".
[5]. Benjamin Johnson: Vera Rubin and Dark Matter. http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~cwp/articles/rubindm/rubindm.html.
[6]. Sir James Jeans: The Mysterious Universe. Pelican Books, London, 1937, p. 85. (Reprint of 2nd edition, 1931; 1st edition, 1930).
[7].Video: "Stephen Hawking's Universe". BBC, London, 1997.

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Last update '02 Aug 5