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Echoes Hint At Accelerating Universe Expansion

Posted by timothy on from the say-that-12-times-quickly dept.

cr0kin0le writes "400,000 years after the Big Bang, oscillations between gravitationally contracting matter and outward radiation pressure left newly discovered acoustic echoes. Independent teams from U. of Arizona and U. of Durham, England have found circular ripples with wavelengths of 500 million light-years which indirectly imply that universal expansion is accelerating due to dark energy."

3 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Just a illusion by lazy+genes · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The expansion rate of the expansion of the universe might equal the contraction rate between andromeda and the milkyway.Gravitational lensing in reverse. Can the fabric of space-time around the milky way warp to create this illusion.Dark matter and d-energy could be explained by the contraction and expansion of space-time . I also would like to know why the cmb cant be a phase change of some kind.I know Greenbay cannot be anywhere close to the center of the universe.

  2. Re:PFFFHHHH by TeknoHog · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Dark energy or dark matter or whatever dark clever tag you want to give it is just another way of saying " we don't know what it is so we'll make an educated SWAG (scientific wild ass guess)...just so we don't have to admit to anyone taht that we don't know...

    I agree to some extent. It seems too complicated. One problem is IMHO that General Relativity is taken as an absolute gospel, and then we need all these complications to make observations fit theory. Whereas other theories besides GR can explain things more simply (hello Ockham!). I suggest everyone who's interested in these things take a look at Dynamic Universe, but there are other alternative theories as well.

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  3. The expanding universe is wrong. by Smilin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hubble found that nearby objects are red shifted and objects farther away are even more red shifted.

    These observations were explained by saying that the universe is expanding and doing so at an accelerating rate. We've now spent decades trying to adjust this theory to fit new observations.

    What if the original explanation of the observations was backwards?

    Our observations of an expanding universe can also be explained by a collapsing universe. If you simply let the universe fall into a singularity that is at an infinite distance away everything will appear red shifted in exactly the same way it does now.

    Objects closer than us to the singularity will appear to be accelerating away. Although objects further away from the singularity will still be falling in, they won't be accelerating as fast as us (who are nearer) so they'll appear to be shooting away from us as well.

    Objects perpendicular to the direction of acceleration will appear blue shifted but only if they are *exactly* perpendicular. If the singularity is an infinite distance away that slice of space were blue shifting will occur will be infinitely thin (hence won't exist).

    So there. :P