More Trouble For LambdaCDM Cosmological Paradigm?
Today it was reported in Nature that astrophysicists have observed a remarkably dense cluster of fourteen galaxies with an age of about 90% of the age of the observable universe, 12.4 billion years.
This does not fit well with the just-so story called the LambdaCDM “precision” cosmological model that is regularly hyped as the only viable cosmological paradigm in town.
Here are some relevant comments on the new observations from astrophysicists.
“Having caught a massive galaxy cluster in throes of formation is spectacular in and of itself,” said Scott Chapman, an astrophysicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who specializes in observational cosmology and studies the origins of structure in the universe and the evolution of galaxies.
“But, the fact that this is happening so early in the history of the universe poses a formidable challenge to our present-day understanding of the way structures form in the universe,” he said.
“How this assembly of galaxies got so big so fast is a bit of a mystery, it wasn’t built up gradually over billions of years, as astronomers might expect,” said Tim Miller, a doctoral candidate at Yale University and coauthor on the paper.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-04-astronomers-witness-galaxy-megamerger.html#jCp
Those who tell us over and over that we have an excellent understanding of the cosmos never seem to be bothered by the serious problems of the LambdaCDM model, which have been clearly laid out by Steinhardt and Loeb (https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/sciam3.pdf), as well as many others. Science is not like religion; there is not One True Faith in science. Alternative cosmological paradigms like Big Bounce models and fractal models need to be considered on a level playing field.