No acceleration of expansion and no dark energy?

[bojan]

This may be interesting...

http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.1639
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/08/14/0901627106.abstract
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090817-dark-energy-alternative.html

[renormalised]

Sounds very interesting....downloaded the .pdf and I'll read it later.

[sheeny]

Interesting. Thanks Bojan.

I've scanned the PDF, but I'll have to spend more time to digest it.

Al.

[Robh]

Very interesting!

Hopefully, alternative explanations like this one will eventually get astronomy back on track and the unpalatable Dark Energy will be shelved. It's about time someone questioned the perception of an accelerating expansion!

Interesting that the wave flow through space-time is not mentioned in connection with gravity. Is this different to a gravitational wave?

Regards, Rob

[renormalised]

I have a funny feeling that the CC will be around for awhile longer, yet. The problem with an accelerating expansion is that it doesn't fit in with everyone's nice and tidy little views of how things should be and they're still trying to get used to it. Although, if something better comes along that explains all the observational evidence and fits all the mathematical parameters more efficiently than accelerated expansion (DE and CC), then all the more cuedos to it. However, it's got some rather large hurdles to overcome.

And that's the first one....I haven't read the paper yet, but what they're going to have to explain to everyone satisfactorily is what is the wave. If it's not gravity, or EM derived then what is it...a disturbance in the Higgs Field, vibrating spacetime, torsional stress on spacetime caused by a rotating universe, an observational effect of another universe's presence on our spacetime??. Who knows?? Could be random noise in spacetime generated when gravity froze out from the other forces, or some disturbance (other than inflation) generated when the false vacuum collapsed at the beginning of inflation. But no matter what its origin and what it is, like I said, it's going to have to explain all the observational evidence and satisfy the rest of cosmological theory.