Galaxies Expanding Faster? Or Not...

[Luminatus]

So this topic may be misleading... It is not as much whether the galaxies are getting further away from us at a faster rate.. it is more the question of why.. I have been watching Stephen Hawking's new documentary on the Discovery Channel and found some interesting things.

 

First was the idea of a train moving at 99.9 percent the speed of light around the earth. If this were possible and was moving in the orbit of the earth, then if we could look inside the train the people would all be moving in extreme slow motion... to them we would be moving in extremely fast motion. For every 100 years that passed for those of us outside the train only one week would pass for those inside...

 

Then the theory was later mentioned about the fact that dark matter is "pushing" the galaxies apart and spreading out the universe... I will up front not deny that the universe is expanding... It always has been....

 

However, is it really expanding at increasing speed? I ask this for a few reasons... we know that Speed and Mass even on our own planet or just outside our planet in our orbit can effect our perception of time, and objects can fractionally move into the future... not enough to ever notice..

 

So.. take into account the unknown properties of dark matter... then take into account that each galaxy not only has... well lets do this for earth... the mass of the earth, the mass of everything near the earth with gravitational effect... other planets, stars, and ultimately, the black hole of our galaxy.. so outside of that there is the mysterious dark matter, and then each other galaxy has its own unique properties...

 

So.. What if the galaxies have always been moving at the same speed apart from each other as they have always been as far as universal time is concerned... not "earth" time mind you, but universal... As far as earth time is concerned, what if we are actually watching the galaxies travel into the future? In that case then yes, they would be moving away from us faster than before... but not because of a Dark Matter pushing them physically, but because we can't measure it based on our Earth perception of space and time...

 

Just like when 100 years pass on earth in the same time as a train traveling 99.9 percent the speed of light travels in 7 days... what if for example every 7 days of earth time accounts for 100 years of movement of another galaxy...

 

I do not have the scientific or mathematical background to even come close to pondering this.. However, I assume the show on discovery channel I was just watching was not only created for entertainment purposes, but to get ideas and off the wall theories floating around so they can be disproven, or so that maybe, just maybe someone might find enough interest in it to look into it with their own expertise...

 

I will be very interested to know what others opinions are on this matter.

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Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

 

So I was just given a great example to compare with the universe expansion. The following is the example, followed by my theory:

 

EXAMPLE:

think of a rubber sheet

it's suspended above the ground

and you put random balls on it

they make little dimples

depending on how big they are

on that sheet there are little tiny ants

the ants run at.. say.. 0.1 mph

they run AWAY from one another

so their relative speed from one another is double, right?

0.1 left, 0.1 to the right ==> they move away from one another at 0.2 mph

constant.

now we take this sheet of rubber and stretch it

obviously, we stretch it FASTER then the ants move

so the distance will grow

but the ants aren't moving faster, they still move, each, at 0.1mph

but it seems to them, when they look back, that their friend moves at INSANE speed

because *space* stretched.

 

THEORY:

This hasn't taken into consideration the whole idea of distortion of time based on mass of the earth, etc...

as far as the rubber and dimples and ants.. my theory is that they are still moving at 0.1 away from each other but while our earth's mass and mass of our galaxy is distorting our perception of time..these other galaxies are moving say 3 times that before we think it should have moved the 0.1, causing us to perceive it as moving faster....

 

see, we think it moves say 0.8 for example... and it actually has... but whereas we think it moved it in the time it should have moved 0.2, its just that time has been distorted and our perception is off...

 

maybe this is making more sense... any ideas?

Edited April 26, 2010 by Luminatus
Consecutive posts merged.

[Spyman]

Accelerating universe

The accelerating universe is the observation that the universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate. In 1998 observations of Type Ia supernovae suggested that the expansion of the universe is accelerating since around redshift of z~0.5.

 

Corroboration

In the past few years, these observations have been corroborated by several independent sources: the cosmic microwave background radiation and large scale structure, age of the universe,as well as improved measurements of the supernova and X-ray properties of galaxy clusters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe

[MUTANT]

I am interested in the accelerated expansion as well and why it is happening. Observations confirm it is happening, and they then devise ways of explaining it.

I personally believe the universe is "GROWING" at an accelerated rate and not just expanding. I believe both are happening. I personally do not believe our

universe is the only one and I believe that other universes (or multiverses if you will) are also interconnected. I believe space is a real "THING" and not

emptiness. I believe that "SPACE-TIME" is pouring into our universe from other universe(s) and it is pouring in from every direction thus causing

galaxies to (generally) be moving apart from one another in every direction (mostly anyway). This concept invokes a higher dimensional universe

concept but that is not unusual as far as space-time theories go and it does not involve the invention of some kind of dark matter or dark energy.

 

All that is required is that some kind of pump(s) are pushing more stuff into our Universe. Our universe simply interacts with other universes in

very simplistic exchanges of stuff (information, space-time, etc). At present, our universe is receiving more stuff in that it is pushing out.

This likely changes continually as things morph around and change between the universes.

 

I am interested in all the dark matter/energy hocus pocus as well.. there is some merit too it. I just tend to think things are usually more simple

that we make out sometimes and just because we cant come up with a simplistic model doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. It usually

means we haven't seen the big picture yet.

 

~MUTANT

Edited July 30, 2010 by MUTANT

[Narroo]

Hm, well, light travels at the same speed relative to any observer, regardless of their speed. The acceleration of galaxies is measured using light frequencies-red shift, so unless something is wrong with relativity, their observations should be correct.

 

I'm far from an expert though, so is there anyone more knowledgeable here?

[timo]

1) The stuff responsible for an (accelerated) expansion is "dark energy" (provided it exists), not "dark matter" (which is supposed to be responsible for a different effect and arguably much more likely to exist).

2) The idea of taking into account the effect of mass on time is, to my knowledge (but I am not in the field), not so bad. In fact, about two years ago there was a colloquial talk at my university where the speaker was talking about exactly that. He threw away the standard assumption that the distribution of mass is homogeneous at the relevant length scales. I don't remember what he exactly did instead (probably something Monte-Carlo over a density distribution pushing experimental results through this filter) but he claimed that his results were compatible with the assumption that there is no dark matter. However: That sounds like a great result. And it has not become the standard argument, yet (as far as I know, at least). So it's probably not as easy as it sounds (though I definitely like the idea to replace the assumption of a homogeneous mass distribution with something better). I'll see if I can find the name of the speaker, but I doubt it.

 

EDIT: Hah, we have an archive: Prof. David L. Wiltshire, University of Canterbury, Neuseeland, "Gravitational energy as dark energy: towards concordance cosmology without Lambda". And as a service: http://www2.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/~dlw24/universe/

 

EDIT2: Removed a comment since I figured out it wasn't the OP I was quoting.

Edited August 2, 2010 by timo