By Mayank Chhaya-
The universe could well be nearly twice as old as the widely accepted 13.797 billion years. That extraordinary contention in a recent paper by University of Ottawa Professor Rajendra Gupta has the potential to upend much of what we have come to accept about the age of the universe.
What triggered Professor Gupta’s study was some profoundly puzzling discoveries by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Two in particular threw off the astrophysics community—a star named Methuselah, which is at least a billion years older than the universe and several fully mature galaxies within barely 300 million years of the Big Bang. In other words, what should have taken billions of years of cosmic evolution was evident in these galaxies so soon after the Big Bang. These discoveries were seen by many in the astrophysics community as having the potential to force the reinvention of cosmology.
Professor Gupta’s paper revives a nearly 100-year-old tired light theory and let it coexist with the expanding universe to arrive at its real age of 26.7 billion years. In a sense, he reinterprets the redshift, or the light stretched by the expanding universe into the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum, as a hybrid phenomenon, rather than purely due to expansion.
Professor Gupta spoke to Mayank Chhaya Reports to explain the physics of the age of the universe.
