Dark Energy

 

            In 1998, after two groups of astronomers made a survey of supernovas in distant galaxies they found that the supernovas were dimmer than they should have been, and that meant they were farther away than they should have been.

            The astronomers came to this conclusion because the types of supernovas they were looking for always have the same brightness.  At first they tried to rule out obvious causes for the dimness such as dust being in the way but to no avail.  So, the astronomers invented something called dark energy that makes the universe expand faster and faster as time goes on.  Most scientists think that this is a function of gravity rather than a new force.

In this short article, I would like to raise a couple of other possibilities, which I ‘hope’ have already been ruled out but I have not seen upon searching the Internet.  I think that lately scientists have been putting aside Occam’s razor (basically, the simplest possibility is the most likely) and looking into fantastical theories which get a lot of publicity and therefore research dollars.  Now, Occam’s razor is not a law but a general rule to help direct our thinking.  It is possible that something really unusual is at work but this is the exception and not the rule.  So, these possibilities are put forth before resorting to something as imaginative as dark energy.

One thing that I see tossed around is that Einstein himself came up with this theory.  Let me set the record straight for the layperson.  When Einstein formulated his theory of relativity, all astronomical observations pointed to a conclusion that the universe was static.  However, the equations in relativity pointed to a dynamic universe.  To make his theory fit the observable data of the time, Einstein threw in what is called the cosmological constant, which opposed the force of gravity.  This was just a “quick fix” and no thought to dark matter or anything else was put into this decision.  This is NOT Einstein’s endorsement of dark energy.  Later when it was found that the Universe is expanding, he gladly took the cosmological constant out of the theory.

             The types of supernovas being studied, as said before, are of a known brightness.  Since they are of a known brightness, they are used to determine the distance themselves.  Scientists use triangulation to determine the distance to the closer supernovas.  However, as the distance becomes further, the angle of the triangle becomes so small that this method becomes inaccurate. So, they can take the known distances and brightness of these particular supernovas and compare ones further out to them.  If the explosion is four times dimmer, it should be twice as far out.  There are a few questions to raise here.  First, if the brightness of the supernova is the measuring stick, how do they know if it’s off?  Distance and time measurements in astronomy are a little skewed if you ask me as scientists vary in their estimation of the age of the universe by twenty five percent or greater.  Secondly (and this will be a point in another argument as well), the further out in space we look, the further back in time we also look.  This is because light takes a long time to travel these vast distances.  So, if we are looking at a supernova a billion light years away, we are seeing an event a billion years old.  Is it possible that even though all the close supernovas are the same brightness, a star formed billions of years earlier may have a slightly different composition than the newer stars changing it’s brightness?  As stars burn their hydrogen fuel and sometimes explode, they synthesize heavier elements.  When they explode, they litter the universe with these heavier elements.  As new stars form, they incorporate these heavier elements that earlier stars did not have, possibly changing the characteristics of the supernova.  In short, errors in the astronomer’s measurements should be the VERY FIRST possibility looked at.

             The next possibility is that (and I really hope they accounted for this) further back in time the universe was expanding faster.  In the Big Bang, the universe was imparted with an outward velocity.  This is what causes the red shift.  For close objects the red shift seems linear, for every light year, we loose x amount of frequency in the light due to the expanding universe.  Gravity should be pulling on everything and slowing down the expansion.  However, at long distances we are again looking back in time.  For long-range observations we must realize that those objects are traveling at a different velocity than they are traveling at today because gravity has not had time to slow them down as much.  Therefore through our instruments, it appears that the further away something is the faster it is going because we are looking at a different time period in the Universes history.  In addition, relativistic effects such as time dilatation may be building up over a period of billions of years since we are accelerating (we would call it deceleration but in physics, any change in velocity is an acceleration) in relationship to those objects and therefore their velocity will also seem to be different than expected from an observer on earth.

            The big problem I have with Dark Energy is that it violates the law of Conservation of Energy.  Conservation of Energy is that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant but may change forms.  In the regular old Big Bang theory, all the energy in the Universe was present at the moment of creation.  The big bang imparted velocity on everything including space.  This is kenetic energy.  As time goes on, this kinetic energy is drained by gravity slowing down everything.  In turn everything has an increasing amount of potential energy equal to the loss of kinetic energy minus friction and other lossy processes that turn the energy into heat.  When summed up, all the energy is accounted for.  Dark Energy, if it is instead acclerating everything in the Universe is both increasing potential energy by making things move away faster and increaing potential energy by making everything further apart.  This would mean that the Universe has more energy today than it did when fisrt created.  This leaves three possibilities:  First, either the law of conservation of energy is incorrect.  This is highly doubtful as every observation in the lab and a good chuck of everything we know is partly based on this law.  The second possibility is that the Universe is not a closed system and must be getting more energy from somewhere else.  Third, Dark Energy is a load of dingoes kidneys.  The last one gets my vote. 

            I am hoping that these phenomena can be explained away without resorting to something that dominates the Universe and no one knows anything about (aka: dark energy).  Of course if dark energy is real, the Universe must be getting it's energy from somewhere.  Here is a possible explanation, which seems to fit the data. I heard before that perhaps our universe is the inside of a big black hole.  When you think of this in terms of dark energy, this seems to make sense.  The Big Bang was the creation of the black hole at which time our universe would have separated it’s self from the space and time of the “mother universe”.  An inflationary period would have occurred as the black hole rapidly grew to its correct size based on the amount of matter it originally contained.  In looking at a real black hole, the radius of the event horizon is proportional to the mass of the black hole.  Black holes for the most part are not black; they are sucking in matter, which is swirling around it, turning into x-rays, which are absorbed at a fairly constant rate.  The more matter it absorbs, the larger it gets.  If you return later, you will see that the black hole has grown.  Now the surface area of the event horizon is greater and it can absorb more material in the same amount of time thus accelerating the growth (or expansion).  This mirrors what we apparently see today in our universe.  I like to see this as a perpetual cycle.  Our universe will continue to grow as long as it has matter and energy to gobble up from the “mother universe”.  At that time when the mother universe stops supplying ours, Gravity should take over and start pulling everything back together.  Things will get closer, a black hole will form (if it hasn’t already), and a new baby universe will start.  I would appreciate it if someone could disprove the black hole theory quickly as I don’t think I like the idea of being in a black hole formed by an infinite series of other black holes.

 Ó 2005 Joel Schlecht

Revised 2007