Revolutionary hypothesis: the universe could be twice as old as previously estimated

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A study published in The Astrophysical Journal could revolutionize the currently most accepted theory on the origin of the universe. According to this hypothesis, the time that has passed since the birth of the universe, when the famous Big Bang occurred, would be 13.7 billion years. But this theory also makes the presence of the never-discovered “dark matter” necessary to explain the expansion of the universe to its current state.

According to theoretical physicist Rajendra P. Gupta of the University of Ottawa, Canada, however, the universe is approximately twice as old: 26.7 billion, and the currently accepted age, precisely 13.7 billion years, it would be nothing more than a “trick of light”.

Experimental observations of distant objects

Gupta’s hypothesis would also be supported by the experimental observations that the latest generation telescopes have made possible: astrophysicists are in fact finding it difficult to explain how very distant stellar objects, whose observation here on Earth shows them to be like about a billion years after the Big Bang, appear excessively “mature” for having formed in a relatively short period of time, cosmologically speaking.

Current cosmological models assume that some of the forces governing particle interactions have remained constant over time. Gupta disputes that these constants have remained unchanged since the Big Bang. However, the idea is not entirely new: at the end of the 1920s, in fact, the Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky wondered whether the famous “red shift” that is observed in objects very distant from us was the result of loss of light energy, like a marathon runner exhausted from a long journey through eons of space. But his “tired light” hypothesis competes with the theory now accepted by the majority of astrophysicists, according to which the red shift in the frequency of light is due to the cumulative expansion of space, which attracts light waves like a spring. under tension.

The “tired light”

The consequences of Gupta’s version of the “tired light” hypothesis – which his study calls “covariant coupling constants plus tired light,” abbreviated as CCC+TL – would affect the expansion of the Universe, eliminating the need for the presence of mysterious “dark matter”. According to Gupta, the greater expansion of space since the Big Bang and the almost double age of the universe can be explained more simply at the level of the interactions between currently known particles.