Will astronomers need the cosmological constant to reconcile the ages of old stars and the universe?

This would do the trick if you were still hell-bent that the universe had to have Omega = 1.0000, but if you relax this requirement and say that there isn't really that much Dark Matter in the universe, then you can easily accommodate the expansion rate/age with the age of the oldest stars in globulars, for a low-Omega universe near Omega = 0.1 In other words, there may still be enough Dark Matter to make galaxies sensible systems, dynamically, but that the combination of Dark+Luminous matter is still Omega = 0.1 or 0.2 tops. This would be consistent with the primordial ( baryonic ) element abundances, and you would not need a cosmological constant at all. I favor this simple solution observationally, but this means that since Omega would not equal 1.000, that the inflationary Big Bang cosmology is no longer valid and that would be a shame since it seems to provide explanations for other phenomena in observational cosmology such as why the cosmic background radiation is so uniform at scales greater than the horizon scale.


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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