Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2024

9 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 ASTRO PUBLISHING For these and other reasons, in recent decades, the tired light hypothesis has increasingly fallen into oblivion, at least until Gupta arrived, with the publication of the article mentioned above. Initially, Gupta at- tempted to create a hybrid model, combining the standard expand- ing universe model with that of tired light, to see if the results provided could account for the data collected by Webb. What the scientist achieved was to expand the age of the universe up to 19.3 billion years, a value still insufficient to ac- count for the ob- served structures of early galaxies. S u b s e q u e n t l y , Gupta created a new hybrid model, abandoning the standard one and combining that of tired light with a cosmological the- ory proposed by Paul Dirac in 1937, based on the hypothesis that the gravitational constant decreases slowly over time. This second complex attempt has al- most doubled the age of the uni- verse commonly accepted today, making the precocious galaxies ob- served by Webb no longer preco- cious, since the time available for their formation and evolution lengthens 10 to 20 times compared T he MACS0416 galaxy cluster recently seen by the James Webb Space Telescope in infrared light. It was images like this that revealed to astronomers for the first time that the primordial universe contains galaxies characterized by such a precocious development that it seems impossible to explain their existence with the standard cosmological model. [NASA, ESA, CSA] to the standard model. Even Gupta’s new model, however, will have to be able to satisfactorily interpret all those observations already correctly interpreted by the standard model, and this remains to be seen. At the moment, the solution pro- posed by Gupta to solve the prob- lem of precocious galaxies seems to raise more doubts than certainties, and the astronomical community mostly limits itself to considering it an interesting thought experiment to explore the kind of physics we will need to explain the observa- tions by Webb and possibly future, very powerful telescopes. Let us conclude by asking ourselves a question: “Is it credible that a cen- tury of cosmological studies, which have seen among the protagonists some of the best minds ever, have led to underestimating the age of the universe by almost 50%?” !