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I Am Not an Astrophysicist
Aug. 22nd, 2022 10:04 pmI am not an astrophysicist, so I don't have a lot of strong opinions in this area, but I'm always curious about origin stories. A lot of the time, that revolves around the origins of our odd little Solar System, because that's where I live. :)
Today's curiosity, though, is about the discussions that have been sparked by the deep field images from the Webb Space Telescope. The reports suggest that something is off here, because the galaxies that are showing up at a distance that *should* be shortly after the Big Bang look like perfectly normal galaxies. What's more, it looks like the population of stars there is older than when we believe the Big Bang occurred, if I'm understanding correctly. This is not at all what current theory would predict.
That's fine. You do the observations and you make the necessary adjustments to the theory to match the observations. That's how science is supposed to work. (It's nice if you can make predictions *before* you make the observations and see if you're right, but that's sometimes a bit much to hope for in cosmology.)
But I am now left to wonder: the observations (both old and from the Webb) seem to indicate that red shift is proportional to distance. And the Big Bang theory says that the red shift is due to universal expansion.
What would it mean if the observations are all correct, but the proposed mechanism is wrong? What if red shift isn't due to expansion, but instead results from some other unknown property of space-time? You don't have to *know* what the mechanism is -- Newton didn't know the mechanism for gravity. What kind of cosmology do you end up with if you remove the Big Bang and substitute that unknown property to produce a proportional red shift?
And how would you *test* it?
It's interesting to kick around, that's for sure. :)
Today's curiosity, though, is about the discussions that have been sparked by the deep field images from the Webb Space Telescope. The reports suggest that something is off here, because the galaxies that are showing up at a distance that *should* be shortly after the Big Bang look like perfectly normal galaxies. What's more, it looks like the population of stars there is older than when we believe the Big Bang occurred, if I'm understanding correctly. This is not at all what current theory would predict.
That's fine. You do the observations and you make the necessary adjustments to the theory to match the observations. That's how science is supposed to work. (It's nice if you can make predictions *before* you make the observations and see if you're right, but that's sometimes a bit much to hope for in cosmology.)
But I am now left to wonder: the observations (both old and from the Webb) seem to indicate that red shift is proportional to distance. And the Big Bang theory says that the red shift is due to universal expansion.
What would it mean if the observations are all correct, but the proposed mechanism is wrong? What if red shift isn't due to expansion, but instead results from some other unknown property of space-time? You don't have to *know* what the mechanism is -- Newton didn't know the mechanism for gravity. What kind of cosmology do you end up with if you remove the Big Bang and substitute that unknown property to produce a proportional red shift?
And how would you *test* it?
It's interesting to kick around, that's for sure. :)
