Time within our galaxy flows more slowly than it does outside of it.

Overall, the Universe—with its clusters and connections—remarkably resembles a neural network of the brain.

Scientists from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand claimed that dark energy does not exist. It is not necessary to invoke it while trying to understand the main contradiction of the Universe: that it is expanding faster than the current prevailing theory—the standard cosmological model—predicts.

No Brakes

The significant discrepancy between theoretical predictions and observations presents the most intriguing mystery of modern science. Astrophysicists have struggled with it since 1988. Data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope at that time indicated that galaxies were behaving differently than expected—they were moving apart at an increased speed. This phenomenon was named the "Hubble tension."

Extensive studies conducted in the following years only confirmed the validity of the initial findings.

In 2021, for instance, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, measured the expansion rate of the Universe by observing nearby massive galaxies within a radius of 100 megaparsecs (Mpc) from Earth—approximately 330 million light-years. Under the guidance of astronomy and physics professor Chung-Pei Ma, they used ground-based and space telescopes to monitor surface brightness fluctuations (SBF) in 63 elliptical galaxies. This allowed them to determine the distances to each galaxy, their recession speeds, and, consequently, the "Hubble tension."

The results aligned with those obtained by scientists from Johns Hopkins University, led by Nobel laureate Adam Riess—who received the prestigious physics award in 2011 for proving that the Universe is accelerating in its expansion.

His team initially utilized the same Hubble Space Telescope, and later the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The Further, The Faster

It is commonly accepted that as the distance to a galaxy increases by one megaparsec—about 3.3 million light-years—the speed at which it recedes increases by approximately 67 kilometers per second. However, according to measurements by Riess, Ma, and other "verifiers," this speed increased by 73 kilometers per second, or thereabouts (73.3±2.4 km/s/Mpc). The difference ranged from 8 to 12 percent.

The cause of the "Hubble tension" remains unknown. Similarly, it is unclear why the Universe is expanding at all with acceleration. Following the Big Bang—the beginning of all beginnings—it should have been expanding at a decelerating rate due to gravitational forces.

To explain the observations, astrophysicists invented dark energy—a mysterious substance that uniformly fills nearly 70 percent of the Universe. They suggest that this "unknown something" is what causes the Universe to expand faster and faster, pushing galaxies apart.

The nature of dark energy is undefined—astrophysicists are still in the dark. Yet this does not prevent them from assuming its existence and incorporating its influence into their calculations.

The Universe is expanding with anomalous acceleration.

A Ray of Light in the Dark Realm

Innovators from New Zealand, led by Professor David Wiltshire, observed supernovae and explained the accelerated expansion of the Universe without dark energy. It’s nearly revolutionary—a "ray of light in the dark realm."

Regarding dark energy, the scientists described it differently: as "an optical illusion, a mirage, an error." They suggested that it may not exist at all and reported their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

So what replaces the optical illusion? The model of "temporal landscapes," also known as the "theory of temporal landscapes" or "spacetime model."

The authors indicate that the Universe is woven from a network of galaxies like a spider web—on its scale, of course. In other words, it is not homogeneous in structure. Some areas are empty, while others are dense.

There are threads of galaxies, nodes, clusters, superclusters, and vast regions of empty space. For instance, part of the Milky Way—our galaxy—is bordered on one side by a kind of stellar wall, whose semicircle stretches nearly one and a half billion light-years. On the other side, there is nothing at all. Emptiness. Almost a complete vacuum. That region is called the Void, scientifically speaking, or simply a hole stretching more than a billion light-years from edge to edge.

The Milky Way, along with its nearest galaxies—Andromeda, Triangulum, and about 50 others—forms what is known as the Local Group. This group is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which contains at least 100 local groups and 30,000 galaxies. The Great Attractor pulls it, a structure that includes more than 100,000 galaxies.

The fundamental idea of the theorists from New Zealand is that in areas rich in matter, gravity is stronger, while in empty regions, it is weaker. This affects the flow of time within them.

In voids, time flows faster.

In simpler terms, the clock hands on Earth, located in the Milky Way, move slower than in the aforementioned Void or another vast emptiness. On average, across the Universe, they move 35 percent slower. This creates the illusion of accelerated expansion.

It turns out that somewhere beyond our galaxy, there may be much older space—older than the Milky Way by several billion years.

MEANWHILE

The Impossible is Possible

At the beginning of this year, the James Webb spotted the galaxy ZF-UDS-7329 at the edge of the Universe—the fifth such galaxy that astronomers deemed impossible.

All are located incredibly far away: 13 billion light-years from Earth. This is evidenced by the so-called redshift—for the farthest of them, it exceeds 13.0. This suggests that these galaxies formed at the dawn of creation—just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which is believed to have given rise to the Universe.

To clarify, the sensitive camera (NIRCam) of the James Webb telescope detects infrared radiation from distant objects, which reaches us in a distorted form. Typically, it is shifted into the red part of the spectrum. This phenomenon is referred to as redshift.

It is believed that redshift occurs due to the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it moves away. Consequently, the greater the shift.

Current understanding suggests that the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago. Thus, the five galaxies whose images were transmitted by the telescope appeared among the first—when the Universe was in its infancy. However, they appear much older—massive and well "aged." As if they have "billions of years of evolution" behind them. ZF-UDS-7329, for example, is larger than the Milky Way, which contains hundreds of billions of stars.

Could it be that the "spacetime model" has somehow manifested here? And that the galaxies are indeed older than we think?

Two years ago, when the fifth "impossible" galaxy had yet to be discovered, and the "spacetime model" had not been revealed, Rajendra Gupta—a professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada—proposed in an article, also published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, that the Universe could be much older—not 13.8 billion years, but 26.7 billion.

In the Universe, which has, in places, moved far ahead, "impossible" galaxies could very well have formed and evolved. There would have been enough time.

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