this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
177 points (91.5% liked)
Astronomy
5567 readers
1 users here now
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Losing energy.. to what?
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.
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.
The energy is actually not conserved across the universe in general relativity, as it is currently understood. Conversation of energy is due to the time symmetry, which the expansion of space breaks.