Observational study supports centuries-old theory that challenges Big Bang

A Kansas State University engineer recently published the results of an observational study supporting a century-old theory that directly challenges the validity of the Big Bang theory.

Lior Shamir, associate professor of computer science, used imaging from a trio of telescopes and more than 30,000 galaxies to measure the redshift of galaxies as a function of their distance from Earth. Redshift is the variation in the frequency of light waves emitted by a galaxy, which astronomers use to estimate the speed of a galaxy.

Shamir’s findings support the century-old theory of “tired light” rather than the Big Bang. The results are published in the journal Particles.

“In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble and George Lemaitre discovered that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from Earth,” Shamir said. “This discovery led to the Big Bang theory, suggesting that the universe began expanding about 13.8 billion years ago. Around the same time, the eminent astronomer Fritz Zwicky suggested that galaxies farther from Earth were not actually moving faster.”

Zwicky argued that the redshift observed from Earth is not due to the movement of galaxies but to the fact that light photons lose energy as they travel through space. The longer light travels, the more energy it loses, giving the illusion that galaxies farther from Earth are also moving faster.

“The tired light theory was largely neglected as astronomers adopted the Big Bang theory as the consensus model of the universe,” Shamir said. “But some astronomers’ confidence in the Big Bang theory began to wane when the powerful James Webb Space Telescope saw first light.”

“JWST provided deep images of the early universe, but instead of showing an early universe as astronomers expected, it showed large, mature galaxies. If the Big Bang happened as scientists initially thought, these galaxies are older than the universe itself.”

While new images cast doubt on the Big Bang, Shamir’s study used Earth’s constant rotational speed around the center of the Milky Way to examine the redshift of galaxies moving at different speeds relative to Earth and to test how the change in redshift responds to the change in speed.

“The results showed that galaxies rotating in the opposite direction to the Milky Way have a lower redshift than galaxies rotating in the same direction to the Milky Way,” Shamir explained. “This difference reflects the motion of the Earth as it rotates with the Milky Way. But the results also showed that the difference in redshift increased as the galaxies were farther away from Earth.”

“Since the rotation speed of the Earth relative to the galaxies is constant, the reason for this difference may be the distance between the galaxies and the Earth. This shows that the redshift of the galaxies changes with distance, which is what Zwicky predicted in his theory of tired light.”