Last year, Professor Richard Lieu proposed that there could be gravity happening even without mass. This proposal, outside the conventional understanding of physics, was to explain the effects of dark matter and dark energy, two hypothetical features that are at the cornerstone of the standard model of cosmology. Despite their importance, we have not found them; some people suggest that maybe they do not exist, and the error is in our misunderstanding of what actually does exist.
Lieu now has a follow-up proposal that seems even more dramatic. Dropping the possibility of negative masses and negative densities, the professor suggests the existence of transient temporal singularities: mini Big-Bang-like events that can flood the universe with matter and energy, disappearing just as quickly as they form.
“This new paper proposes an improved version of the earlier model, which is also radically different,” Lieu, a physics professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, said in a statement. “The new model can account for both structure formation and stability, and the key observational properties of the expansion of the universe at large, by enlisting density singularities in time that uniformly affect all space to replace conventional dark matter and dark energy.”
The presence of these singularities would act like dark matter acts, adding an invisible amount of matter, five times the amount of regular matter that we know off. They would also exercise a negative pressure, just like dark energy does, pushing the universe into an accelerated expansion.
“In the current theory, the conjecture is for matter and energy to appear and disappear in sudden bursts and, interestingly enough, there is no violation of conservation laws. These singularities are unobservable because they occur rarely in time and are unresolvedly fast, and that could be the reason why dark matter and dark energy have not been found. The origin of these temporal singularities is unknown – safe to say that the same is true of the moment of the Big Bang itself.”
Dark matter and dark energy are far from a perfect theory so it is good that they are challenged. Still, there are points of Lieu’s idea that are difficult to square with observations, like the existence of galaxies with less dark matter or more than the average. Also, we need testable predictions. If we can’t see them because they appear and disappear, is there another way to test their existence?
The study is published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
Source Link: If "Time Big Bangs" Happen All The Time, Forget Dark Energy And Matter, Claims Professor