Problems with the Big Bang Expanding Universe Theory

In a startling challenge to the widely-popular Big Bang theory, new evidence, to be published this week in the International Journal of Modern Physics, D, indicates that the universe is not expanding after all. The evidence, based on detailed measurements of the size and brightness of hundreds of galaxies, adds to a growing list of observations that contradict the predictions of the increasingly complex Big Bang model.

The new research tested one of the striking predictions of the Big Bang theory: that ordinary geometry does not work at great distances. In the space around us, on earth, in the solar system and the Milky Way, as similar objects get farther away, they look fainter and smaller. Their surface brightness, that is the brightness per unit area, remains constant. In contrast, the Big Bang theory tells us that in an expanding universe objects actually should appear fainter but bigger. Thus in this theory, the surface brightness decreases with the distance. In addition, the light is stretched as the universe expanded, further dimming the light. So in an expanding universe the most distant galaxies should have hundreds of times dimmer surface brightness than similar nearby galaxies, making them actually undetectable with present-day telescopes.

The researchers carefully compared the size and brightness of about a thousand nearby and extremely distant galaxies, using images from the GALEX satellite for nearby ones and from the Hubble Space Telescope for distant ones. They chose the most luminous spiral galaxies for comparisons, matching the average luminosity of the near and far samples. Contrary to the prediction of the Big Bang theory, they found that the surface brightnesses of the near and far galaxies are identical.

The Tolman surface brightness test is one out of a half-dozen cosmological tests that was conceived in the 1930s to check the viability of and compare new cosmological models. Tolman’s test compares the surface brightness of galaxies as a function of their redshift.

A previous study of the relationship between surface brightness and redshift was carried out using the 10m Keck telescope to measure nearly a thousand galaxies’ redshifts and the 2.4m Hubble Space Telescope to measure those galaxies’ surface brightness. The exponent found was not 4 as expected in the simplest expanding model, but 2.6 or 3.4, depending on the frequency band. The authors summarize:

We show that this is precisely the range expected from the evolutionary models of Bruzual and Charlot. We conclude that the Tolman surface brightness test is consistent with the reality of the expansion.

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