This is the last in a series of updates catching up with the many discoveries in 2024 that we’ve not had time to report on. For reasons of time, we’ll have to leave a few out, but we need to clear the decks for the biggest discoveries of 2025!
If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion is predicted to exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance. Beyond a certain point, they should start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.) This is in sharp contrast to ordinary, non-expanding space, where objects look smaller in proportion to their distance.
Since 2014, LPPFusion Chief Scientist Eric Lerner, along with colleagues Riccardo Scarpa and Renato Falomo, has been pointing out in published papers and popular articles that the observations of galaxy sizes from the Hubble Space Telescope and, more recently, the JWST completely contradict the prediction of the expanding universe—Big Bang hypothesis and completely confirm the prediction of the non-expanding hypothesis.
Big Bang theorists have long tried to paper over these blatantly wrong predictions by arguing that distant galaxies, which are observed as they were billions of years ago, were intrinsically tiny, thus just neatly compensating for the illusory expansions that is not observed. However, this idea that these tiny galaxies grew up over time into today’s huge ones is countered by many other sets of observational data.
That contradiction grew a lot sharper in 2024 with the observation of more and more “impossible galaxies”—galaxies that would be physically impossible if they were as tiny as Big Bang calculations predict.
There is a simple way to measure the physical radius of a galaxy that is entirely independent of measuring the size of its image as recorded by a telescope. This is based on the equations of Newton’s law of gravity that allows the radius of an object like a galaxy to be calculated from its mass and its velocity of rotation.
The velocity of rotation of distant galaxies can be measured from their spectra—the plot of light intensity against the wavelength of the light observed. Peaks in the spectra are spread out by the Doppler shift. This causes light from parts of the galaxy rotating away from us to be shifted to slightly longer wavelength and light from parts that are rotating towards us to be shifted to slightly shorter wavelengths. So, the width of the peaks measures the rotation velocity, entirely independently of any assumption about universal expansion.
The mass can be measured by the brightness of light of the galaxies—especially the light from the gas in the galaxies. This gives a minimum mass, since of course the galaxies also contain stars and dust as well as gas. Together these measurements yield a measurement of the minimum radius that the galaxy must have. This radius can then be compared with the radius calculated from the size of the galaxy’s image. This latter calculation depends on the expansion or non-expansion assumption. So, comparing the two measurements becomes another test for expansion.
When this was done for a set of 13 galaxies at redshifts from 3 to 4.7, based on data published in June 2024, Lerner found that the radii of the galaxies as determined from brightness and spectra compared with radii determined from images using the non-expanding hypothesis, the two measurements were about the same. The ratio for the whole sample was 1.22 +/- 0.26, consistent with the same results for both methods.
However, when the same calculation was done using the expanding universe hypothesis, the ratio for the whole sample was 11+/- 3.5. In other words, the radii from the measurements of mass and velocity were on average more than ten times larger than those for the expanding universe hypothesis. This is physically impossible—each galaxy can have only one radius, not two!
To see the impossibility in another way, we can turn the equations around and assume that the expanding universe hypothesis is right. We can then use the observed velocity and the assumed (expanding universe formula) radius to calculate the mass—this is called the “dynamic mass”. We can then compare that with the observed gas mass, calculated from the brightness. In all cases the gas mass is much larger than the dynamic mass, which is supposed to include gas stars, any hypothetical dark mater, and so on. It’s physically impossible for part of the mass to be larger than the whole mass. This is illustrated in Fig. 4.
Figure 4. The blue dots show the logarithm of the ratio of the observed gas mass (independent of expansion or non-expansion) to the dynamic mass as calculated assuming expansion. On this log scale, it’s clear that all the galaxies are “impossible” with gas masses 3 to almost 100 times larger than dynamic masses. The crosses show the mean error in the measurements. The orange dots show the observed gas mas compared with dynamic mass as calculated with the non-expansion hypothesis. The dots cluster around the horizontal axis, with a ratio of 1.
The physical impossibility of the EU radius scaling is also evident in other data sets. For example, Guia, Pauar and Muergh point out that the number of stars per unit volume implied for galaxies at z=4-8 extend as high as 108/pc3, a factor of 100 above the highest densities observed locally and a factor of 30 above that which theoretically would lead to runaway collisions of the stars with each other. These estimates of course use expanding universe formula for converting angular into linear radii. Since density estimates are reduced by a factor of approximately (1+z)4.5 for non-expanding universe assumptions, maximum numbers of stars per unit volume are reduced by at least a factor of 1400, eliminating star densities that exceed those in the local universe and of course the physically impossible ones implied with EU.