Revolutionary hypothesis: the universe could be twice as old as previously estimated

A study published in The Astrophysical Journal could revolutionise the currently most widely accepted theory on the origin of the universe. According to this hypothesis, the time elapsed since the birth of the universe, when the famous Big Bang occurred, would be 13.7 billion years. But this theory also makes the presence of the never discovered 'dark matter' necessary to explain the expansion of the universe to its current state.

According to theoretical physicist Rajendra P. Gupta of the University of Ottawa, Canada, however, the universe would be about twice as old: 26.7 billion, and the currently accepted age of 13.7 billion years would be nothing more than a 'trick of the light'.

Gupta's hypothesis would also be supported by the experimental observations that the latest generation of telescopes have made possible: astrophysicists are in fact at a loss to explain how very distant stellar objects, whose observation here on Earth shows them as they were about a billion years after the Big Bang, appear overly 'mature' to have formed in a relatively short period of time, cosmologically speaking.

Current cosmological models assume that some of the forces governing particle interactions have remained constant over time. Gupta disputes that these constants have remained invariable since the Big Bang. Moreover, the idea is not entirely new: in the late 1920s, Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky wondered whether the famous 'red shift' observed in objects far away from us was the result of light losing energy, like a marathon runner exhausted from a long journey through eons of space. But his 'tired light' hypothesis competes with the theory now accepted by the majority of astrophysicists, according to which the shift towards the red in the frequency of light is due to the cumulative expansion of space, which attracts light waves like a spring under tension.

The consequences of Gupta's version of the 'tired light' hypothesis - which his study calls 'covariant coupling constants plus tired light', abbreviated as CCC+TL - would influence the expansion of the Universe, eliminating the need for the presence of the mysterious 'dark matter'. The greater expansion of space since the Big Bang and the near doubling of the age of the Universe, according to Gupta, would be explained more simply at the level of currently known particle interactions.