Why The Universe Might Not Be Dying

Humans are a race which seem to need to know how everything operates. In the quest for this information we often get things wrong. Getting things wrong is just part of the process which leads to finally getting them right, but sometimes this takes centuries or even millennia. This may be the case with the new theory of the universe. Astronomers claim they have found that the 200,000 galaxies they are studying are putting out only half the light they did 2 billion years ago. Having found this out they announced the universe is dying. What is wrong with that assumption you might ask? First of all we don’t know what might happen over billions of years in the future to completely change this forecast. Just a few years ago scientists were telling us the universe is slowing down and will stop expanding and then head back together forming another super-atom and exploding again and then begin expansion all over again. This was known as the oscillating universe theory. It wasn’t long before another theory appeared based on the fact it seemed the expansion of the universe was not slowing down, but speeding up. This was more like the new theory. It stated everything would just keep expanding until all the bodies in the universe were so far apart everything would grow dark and cold.

One of the sacred teachings in astronomy is the further out you look into space, the older the objects you see. This means if you look at objects which are 10 billion light years away, you are receiving light from them from ten billion years ago, because this is how long light takes to reach us. This means what we are seeing might not even be there anymore. Something went wrong with this theory however and scientists discovered relatively young galaxies mixed in with the ancient ones. How could this be? You don’t hear much about this lately. It just doesn’t seem to fit in with what we have been told to believe. On May 5th, 2015 we observed a galaxy which was said to be 13.1 billion light-years away. This is a record for distance. It is estimated the Big Bang took place only 670 million years before. We are building more powerful telescopes and it is possible we will get to see even further back in time. I have to wonder what will happen if we find older galaxies which exceed the 670 million year date for the Big Bang? This is going to be very interesting. Will scientists revise the date of the Big Bang occurrence or will they change their collective minds and come up with another theory for the universe?

This didn’t end the speculation, because some scientists now believe the universe was speeding up not because of the Big Bang and not because there wasn’t enough gravity to pull it back together, but it was speeding up because something was pulling it, something we couldn’t see which might lie beyond our vision even with the most powerful telescopes. We have heard from scientists about the light production of galaxies being less, but how can they know for sure, could there be a possibility they are incorrect? As with all things which are scientific predictions of actions far in the past, I would not bet any money on them. The calculations used to go back billions of years using simulations or whatever could have some unknown flaw in the data used, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

Let’s talk about the diminishing of light supposedly coming from galaxies. What if less light is reaching the earth than did billions of years ago from the same galaxies? Does this necessarily mean the galaxies are putting out less light? No, it could mean just what it says, less light is reaching us for some other reason or reasons. We have all seen things like fog and mist. They diminish the amount of light we see. They reflect the light or absorb it depending on the conditions. Maybe space has gotten more particles in it in the last two billion years, thus filtering out some of the light we would have received. Maybe the light has to travel through more gas on its trip to earth. There could be many other reasons why we would not be getting as much light from distant galaxies as we used to, if that is even true. It might be interesting to try and figure out if there are more black holes now than there were 2 billion years ago. You may be wondering why I say this and I will be glad to tell you and explain how this ties into this subject. Black holes are said to be so powerful, light cannot escape from them. Perhaps there are far more black holes now and they are absorbing some of, or all of the missing light.

I can understand why scientists would be eager to accept the fact galaxies are dying out over time and there is diminishing resources to produce new ones. It seems logical, just as time traveling in a straight line used to seem. We found out that was wrong and that space and time can be bent. Perhaps we have got the theory of diminishing returns with galaxies wrong also. Many scientists keep telling us the stars work on fusion, but there are those scientists who say this is not possible for if that were true our sun would have burnt out long ago. They claim there is another process taking place. If this is true it is a process we don’t understand. This would mean we are making decisions about the stars in galaxies which are using unknown processes to put out heat and light and coming to some conclusion.

Could the universe be dying, sure? Could the scientists be wrong about this position, sure? So where does this leave us as concerns the universe? The way I see it, the idea of the universe dying out is just another theory in a long line of theories and it too may pass. The exciting part of science is there will always be new theories and sooner or later the correct one will be found for a particular situation, but this doesn’t mean we have found it yet for this situation.