Cosmologist claims Universe may not be expanding

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Particles' changing masses could explain why distant galaxies appear to be rushing away.  Jon Cartwright for Nature.com

In a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server1, Christof Wetterich, a theoretical physicist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, has devised a different cosmology in which the Universe is not expanding but the mass of everything has been increasing. Such an interpretation could help physicists to understand problematic issues such as the so-called singularity present at the Big Bang, he says.

Although the paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, none of the experts contacted by Nature dismissed it as obviously wrong, and some of them found the idea worth pursuing. “I think it’s fascinating to explore this alternative representation,” says Hongsheng Zhao, a cosmologist at the University of St Andrews, UK. “His treatment seems rigorous enough to be entertained.”

Others say that Wetterich’s interpretation could help to keep cosmologists from becoming entrenched in one way of thinking. “The field of cosmology these days is converging on a standard model, centred around inflation and the Big Bang,” says physicist Arjun Berera at the University of Edinburgh, UK. “This is why it’s as important as ever, before we get too comfortable, to see if there are alternative explanations consistent with all known observation.”

Period16 Jul 2013

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