Cosmologists Question the Big Bang

Did the Big Bang really happen? In June 2005, researchers met at the first ever Crisis in Cosmology conference in Monção, Portugal to try to answer this question. The researchers argued that Big Bang theory fails to explain certain important cosmological observations. They have suggested that we should not simply accept Big Bang theory, but investigate its validity and search for alternative explanations of how the Universe came to be.

Riccardo Scarpa of the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile, says Big Bang theory fails to predict three things that we observe in the Universe today: the temperature of the Universe, the expansion of the Universe, and the presence of galaxies. Scarpa says, “Every time the basic Big Bang model has failed to predict what we see, the solution has been to bolt on something new—inflation, dark matter, dark energy.” One of the conference organizers, Eric Lerner, president of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in West Orange, New Jersey, argues that Big Bang predictions are being fixed after the event because they are consistently wrong. Critics of Big Bang theory argue that all this tinkering to make observed data fit the theory is not science.

According to the accepted view, because light from ultra-distant galaxies takes billions of years to reach us, stars from these galaxies should appear to us as they were in their youths, full of young stars. Lerner says that is not what we see. He refers to observations of high red-shift galaxies by NASA’s Spitzer space telescope. A galaxy’s red shift is a measure of how much the Universe has expanded since it emitted its light. As the light travels through an expanding Universe, its wavelength gets stretched, corresponding to a shift towards the red end of the spectrum. The Spitzer galaxies’ red shifts correspond to the time when the Universe was between about 600 million and 1 billion years old. Galaxies this young should be full of newborn stars that emit blue light because they are extremely hot. However, these galaxies contain cool, red stars. Because Spitzer is sensitive to infrared light, it is the first telescope to be able to detect red stars in faraway galaxies. According to Lerner, these galaxies aren’t young at all; they have about the same range of stars as present-day galaxies.

Cosmologists justify the discrepancy by arguing that there are large uncertainties in estimating the ages of galaxies. Lerner’s response is that there are other distant objects that appear much older than they should be. He states that at high red-shift we can see clusters and huge superclusters of galaxies, which would have taken much longer than a billion years to form.

Lerner says that the reason for this is that the red shift is not caused by the expanding Universe, but by some other mechanism. To test this theory, he would like to see sensitive experiments on Earth capable of detecting minute changes in light. One possibility would be to modify the LIGO detector in Hanford, Washington State, which is designed to detect gravitational waves by bouncing perpendicular beams of laser light hundreds of times between mirrors 4 kilometers apart. Lerner believes that LIGO could be modified to measure any intrinsic red-shifting that light might undergo. If this experiment were to get the go ahead and Lerner were proved right, it would mean that there is no proof that the Universe is expanding. There would be no need to invoke the concept of dark energy to account for the apparent acceleration of the universe’s expansion, and no reason to believe that the Universe started with the Big Bang.

Most cosmologists believe that the cosmic microwave background, which was first detected in 1965, is the fading glow of the Big Bang. Big Bang theory says that the hot radiation that filled space after the Universe was born has been trapped inside ever since because it has nowhere else to go. Over the past 13.7 billion years, as the Universe has expanded, the radiation has cooled to today’s temperature of less than 3 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.

Lerner, however, argues that there is no evidence to support the cosmologists’ claim that the microwave background has to be evidence of the big bang: “If you wake up in a tent and everything around you is white, you don’t conclude you’ve seen the start of the Universe; you conclude you’re in a fog.” Lerner believes that the cosmic background radiation is really starlight that has been absorbed and re-radiated. This is an old idea that was widely promoted by Fred Hoyle, known for his skepticism about the Big Bang. Hoyle believed that starlight was absorbed by needle-light grains of iron injected by supernovae and then radiated as microwaves. Most cosmologists dismissed Hoyle’s idea because he never found any evidence to back it up.

Lerner has a similar theory, but he thinks that instead of iron whiskers being responsible, the background is caused by threads of electrically charged gas called plasmas. Quasars, highly energetic galaxies, squirted jets of plasma into intergalactic space. Lerner believes these plasma filaments are continually fragmented until they fill the Universe like fog. This fog scattered the infrared light radiated by dust that had absorbed starlight. This caused the infrared radiation to become uniform in all directions, just as the cosmic microwave background now appears to be.

According to Lerner, standard cosmology theory overlooks processes involving plasmas, despite the fact that 99.99 percent of matter in the Universe is controlled by plasma, which is controlled by electromagnetic forces. Lerner complains, “all astronomers insist on believing that gravity is the only important force in the Universe.” Lerner insists that theories should include plasma phenomena as well as gravity, and that theories should be more rigorously tested against observations.

Scarpa is concerned about inconsistencies in the theory of dark matter. Big Bang theory fails to explain how galaxies could have congealed from the matter created shortly after the Universe’s birth. The gas and dust made from normal matter were spread too evenly for galaxies to clump together in only 13.7 billion years. Cosmologists resolve this problem by adding invisible dark matter to the Universe, which adds the extra gravitational pull to help speed up galaxy formation. The addition of dark matter also helps explain the rapid motion of outlying stars in galaxies. Astronomers have measured stars orbiting their galactic centers so quickly that they should be flung off into galactic space. Dark matter would help explain how the galaxies hold onto these stars. It can also explain how clusters of galaxies can hold on to galaxies that are orbiting the center of the cluster so quickly that they ought to fly off into space as well.

Scarpa argues, “If you believe in dark matter, you discover there is too much of it.” His observations point to dark matter in places where cosmologists say it shouldn’t exist. Nobody expects to see dark matter in globular clusters, tight knots of stars that orbit many galaxies, including the Milky Way. Dark matter cannot emit any light or any other form of electromagnetic radiation. Therefore, a cloud of dark matter cannot radiate away its internal heat, which is vital for gravitational contraction. This means that dark matter cannot easily clump together at scales as small as those of globular clusters. However, Scarpa and his colleagues have found that stars in three globular clusters, including Omega Centauri—the biggest globular cluster in the Milky Way, containing about a million stars--are moving faster than the gravity of visible matter can explain. Their speed must be caused by something other than dark matter.

From their observations of globular clusters, Scarpa’s team believes that Newton’s law of gravity, which states that the gravitational pull of an object is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from it, holds true only above some critical acceleration. Below this threshold strength, gravity appears to dissipate more slowly than Newton predicts. The same effect has also been spotted in spiral galaxies and galaxy-rich clusters. More than 20 years ago, Mordehai Milgrom at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, proposed a theory called modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) to explain it. Scarpa says that the critical acceleration of 10-10 per second that was identified for galaxies seems to hold for globular clusters as well. Both Milgrom and Scarpa agree that dark matter is not needed to explain conditions in the Universe.

One criticism of MOND is that it is not compatible with Einstein’s theory of relativity, and therefore is not valid for objects traveling close to the speed of light or in very strong gravitational fields. This means MOND has been unable to make predictions about black holes, pulsars or the Big Bang. However, Jacob Bekenstein at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel has created a relativistic version of MOND. In May 2005, a team led by Constantinos Skordis of the University of Oxford showed that relativistic MOND can make cosmological predictions. The researchers reproduced the distribution of galaxies throughout the Universe and the observed properties of the cosmic microwave background.

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MWAP) also appears to show that there is something wrong with the standard model of cosmology. Since it was launched in 2001, WMAP has been taking the temperature of the Universe from its vantage point 1.5 million kilometers out in space. WMAP measures the way the temperature of the cosmic microwave background varies across the sky. Cosmologists think that the tiny variations from one place to another are an imprint of the state of the Universe about 300,000 years ago, when matter began to clump together under gravity. Hotter patches correspond to denser regions, while cooler patches correspond to areas that are less dense. These density variations began life as quantum fluctuations in the vacuum in the first split second of the universe’s existence; they were subsequently amplified by inflation, a brief period of extremely fast expansion.

These quantum variations should have popped up at random, so the hot and cold spots observed in one part of the sky should be like those in any other part. In addition, because the cosmic background radiation is a feature of the Universe as a whole, not of any particular object in it, none of the hot or cold regions should be aligned with structures in our part of the Universe. However, in early 2005, João Magueijo and Kate Land of Imperial College London reported that they had found an alignment in the cosmic microwave background. When analyzing hot and cold spots as a blend of patterns of different spatial frequencies, Magueijo and Land noticed a striking similarity between the individual patterns. The spots in each pattern seemed to line up along the same direction, instead of being scattered randomly across the sky. Magueijo called this alignment “the axis of evil.”

Charles Bennett, leader of the WMAP mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, does not think that the appearance of the axis of evil could be caused a problem with the WMAP satellite. Bennett believes it is possible that the heat given off by the Milky Way has not properly been subtracted from the WMAP signals, and this is mimicking the axis of evil. Others have pointed out that Magueijo and Land’s conclusions are based on only one year’s worth of WMAP signals, and more confirmatory data is needed.

Magueijo and Land are convinced that the alignment does exist. Magueijo says that the alignment could have been created if the Universe was shaped like a slab, with space extending to infinity in two dimensions, but spanning only about 20 billion light years in the third direction. A preferred direction could also be created if the Universe were shaped like a bagel, or if the Universe were rotating, which would single out the axis of rotation as different from all other directions. Magueijo says that people assume that the Universe is the same in all places and directions because without this assumption, it would be impossible to simplify Einstein’s equations enough to solve them for the Universe. He adds that if this assumption is wrong, the standard model of cosmology would be unusable.

Lerner says that a large part of the problem is that cosmology is bankrolled by only a few sources. The committees that control funding are dominated by supporters of Big Bang theory. Last year, conference members wrote an open letter with over 30 signatories, warning that failure to fund research on alternative theories to the Big Bang suppressed free debate in the field of cosmology. However, the axis of evil has created enough interest that Bennett and his colleague Gary Hinshaw have obtained money from NASA to carry out a five-year exhaustive examination of the WMAP signals, which should rule out the possibilities of instrumental error and contamination.