A potentially contentious new study argues that the universe's expansion might be a mirage, according to Space.com.
This rethinking of the cosmos also suggests solutions for the puzzles of dark energy and dark matter, which scientists believe account for around 95% of the universe's total energy and matter but remain shrouded in mystery, as the science news portal further mentioned.
In a paper published on June 2 in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, Lucas Lombriser, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Geneva, describes the revolutionary new approach.
According to the study named "Cosmology in Minkowski Space,", Scientists said they know the universe is expanding because of redshift, the stretching of light's wavelength towards the redder end of the spectrum as the object emitting it moves away from us. Distant galaxies have a higher redshift than those nearer to us, suggesting those galaxies are moving ever further from Earth.
"In this work, we put on a new pair of glasses to look at the cosmos and its unsolved puzzles by performing a mathematical transformation of the physical laws that govern it," Lombriser told Live Science via email.
"I was surprised that the cosmological constant problem simply seems to disappear in this new perspective on the cosmos," Lombriser said.
