The unexplained acceleration of pretty much everything in the universe has lead to some pretty out-there explanations - but that’s okay, because everything they’re explaining is billions of light-years out there too. The leading contender so far is mysterious “Dark Energy” (which we’re fairly sure Mr Fantastic used to beat Galactus once), but now there’s a new theory: that the Big Bang created Big Waves which are accelerating everything away from us.
If you just asked “Waves in what?”, well done, and if not, start learning to question what people tell you a bit more. The waves are actually waves in spacetime itself - a set of solutions to Einstein’s equations of relativity. What you might not know is that each set of solutions actually describes a universe (or at least the spacetime of one), and since only one actually happened as far as we know we’ve been working to find out which it was.
The new solutions involve perturbations to the standard accepted solutions, generating ripples in spacetime spreading out from the Big Bang itself. According to the theory these waves are what is pushing everything away from us faster than explained - removing the need for a mysterious otherwise unobservable intergalactic boogeyman to do it for us.
But don’t start whiting-out Dark Energy just yet. The new theory has an awful lot of hurdles to clear before anything near acceptance - it may explain the acceleration of faraway objects (although it demands the coincidence that we happen to be in the middle of an area of expansion), but it turns out we’ve been studying the sky for a while. There are a whole host of other observations the theory must explain, or work out how to, and it’ll be interesting to see how such an alternate explanation holds up. Otherwise it’s like buying a replacement car with a spoiler without checking to see if it has wheels.
The result? Another awesome new idea, and even the people who think it’s rubbish do so by holding up empirically observed phenomena and patiently waiting while the correct analysis is performed. If only the rest of the world was as good as science.
Luke McKinney
“Big Wave” Theory http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090817-dark-energy-alternative.html
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