[Baxter Renegade]

New research suggests the universe may not actually be expanding... several scientists are jumping on board:

http://www.calgaryherald.com/touch/s...tml?id=8807838

Sure enough, the telescope revealed that most galaxies exhibit such a “red shift” - and, moreover, that the extent of the red shift became greater as the galaxies became more distant. The only conclusion was that the universe was expanding. From the point of view of the inhabitants of any one of its galaxies, it looked as if your neighbours were rushing away from you.

This idea might sound humdrum. But it marked the dawn of a revolutionary new view of the nature, origin, and fate of the universe, suggesting that billions of years ago, the universe must have been far denser than it is now, and that it started in a Big Bang.

Now that conventional thinking has been turned on its head in a paper by Prof Christof Wetterich at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He points out that the tell-tale light emitted by atoms is also governed by the masses of their constituent particles, notably their electrons. The way these absorb and emit light would shift towards the blue part of the spectrum if atoms were to grow in mass, and to the red if they lost it.

Because the frequency or “pitch” of light increases with mass, Prof Wetterich argues that masses could have been lower long ago. If they had been constantly increasing, the colours of old galaxies would look red-shifted - and the degree of red shift would depend on how far away they were from Earth. “None of my colleagues has so far found any fault [with this],” he says.