this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Astronomy

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Heh

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (7 children)

This doesn’t answer the question in the context of this theory, but the current understanding is that light does lose energy as it travels through expanding space. As the space it’s in expands, the wavelength gets longer, and the energy goes down. It doesn’t go anywhere; energy just isn’t conserved in an expanding space-time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

If the light loses energy, then it must surely lose it to something? And if your last point that energy isn't being conserved in our universe, in which case we are either in some deep shit with the first law of thermodynamics, or our universe isn't an isolated system.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Seems energy is not conserved.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/

The thing about photons is that they redshift, losing energy as space expands. If we keep track of a certain fixed number of photons, the number stays constant while the energy per photon decreases, so the total energy decreases.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Ok. Smarter people probably thought of this, and probably found my hypothesis to be impossible. But what if... It is the the other way around. What if photons are losing energy because they are expanding spacetime. Like tiny little springs expanding out.

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