Has Light got a decay factor?

Your assumption is that Physicists know somethings that any one else can't.  Or turn that around and some things physicists can't know either.  So you are correct.  NONE know that photons age,  NOT ONE.  And your opinion  is ?

Einstein once said "imagination is more important than knowledge" .  I imagined that there would be someone on this site that could answer the questions I have about the Big Bang  ie Galaxies flying apart at close to the speed of light. Trillions of Galaxies squished into a tiny space smaller than a pin head, that it all came from nothing when energy can't be created or destroyed etc etc. It didn't make sense so started looking for another explanation. If light decayed by it's wave length lengthening over distance like ripples in a pond that would be another explanation for what we see.

Edwin Hubble himself said in a letter that he thought it was likely that there was another explanation for the Red Shift, rather than just recession, but as a scientist he could only go with what the science of the time was telling him.

Light does not appear to have a 'decay factor' from all the tests . However Gravitation Red Shift

is proven now. It's one small step from there to explain the majority of Red Shift . That is the 'decay' I was looking for . The catalyst for this whole thread .

Am I 'qualified' to talk about this subject...no, even after all these years of reading up on the subject. Was Einstein , a patent clerk,  qualified? According to Dr Spudnik that would also be a NO .

I'm no Einstein but I do have imagination which is something very irritating to bad teachers who just want you to learn what is being taught without questioning or discussing.

I say, question everything because "it ain't necessarily so" .

Or to put it another way...doctorates?..." we don't need no stinking badges"....spit >>

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard Feynmann

...irrelevant.

Not much new science reported of late that I can find. Watched an article on Quasars....those 'things' that break the laws of physics if they are 13 Billion light years away. Can't be that their Red Shift is mainly due to Gravitational Red Shift can it guys? I mean that might undermine the whole Big Bang theory and we couldn't have that. Think of all the teachers with egg on face. No, we must leave things as they are until a better theory comes along. It all has no importance whatsoever any way. Truth isn't a prerequisite for any syllabus . You just need an acceptance by the finance committee. Beating them with large sticks until they accept it, though frowned upon, is acceptable.

well exactly...and until that time arrives here is an interlude while we wait...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ4-hDKorQE

 How fast is the Milky Way Galaxy moving? The speed turns out to be an astounding 1.3 million miles per hour, nowhere close to the speed of light which is- Light travels at a constant speed of 1,079,252,848.8 (1.07 billion) km per hour. That works out to 299,792,458 m/s, or about 670,616,629 mph (miles per hour).

Galaxies at the outer fringes are "moving away from each other" faster than the speed of light as the space in the universe is expanding. But their actual "speed" is a relative term. If galaxies were moving near the speed of light, they'd be long, long gone.

Role in Modern Astrophysics: (Copied)
Einstein’s theory that the speed of light in vacuum is independent of the motion of the source and the inertial reference frame of the observer has since been consistently confirmed by many experiments. It also sets an upper limit on the speeds at which all massless particles and waves (which includes light) can travel in a vacuum.

One of the outgrowths of this is that cosmologists now treat space and time as a single, unified structure known as spacetime – in which the speed of light can be used to define values for both (i.e. “lightyears”, “light minutes”, and “light seconds”). The measurement of the speed of light has also become a major factor when determining the rate of cosmic expansion.

The Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future. According to the hypothesis, first published in 2003, the scale factor of the universe and with it all distances in the universe, which is known to be accelerating, will be found to increase exponentially. If this were to happen, the model speculates that eventually in many billions of years' time the scale factor would become infinitely large, pulling even subatomic particles and the fabric of spacetime apart, ending our universe.

Estimated time to the end of the universe?

20/25 Billion years. Take that vacation now !

Gravitational redshift
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In Einstein's general theory of relativity, the gravitational redshift is the phenomenon that clocks in a gravitational field tick slower when observed by a distant observer. More specifically the term refers to the shift of wavelength of a photon to longer wavelength (the red side in an optical spectrum) when observed from a point in a lower gravitational field. In the latter case the 'clock' is the frequency of the photon and a lower frequency is the same as a longer ("redder") wavelength.

The gravitational redshift is a simple consequence of Einstein's equivalence principle ("all bodies fall with the same acceleration, independent of their composition") and was found by Einstein eight years before the full theory of relativity.

Observing the gravitational redshift in the solar system is one of the classical tests of general relativity. Gravitational redshifts are an important effect in satellite-based navigation systems such as GPS. If the effects of general relativity were not taken into account, such systems would not work at all.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics/quantum-physics/in-in-nuclei/v/introduction-to-exponential-decay

Thank you for your comments Titled Patzer. "How fast is the Milky Way Galaxy moving?" For our galaxy to move you need a reference point. What was yours ? IF the reference point is the center of the galaxy, we aren't moving.  Maybe the earth is, once around the sun per year.    "Galaxies at the outer fringes are "moving away from each other" faster than the speed of light as the space in the universe is expanding."  Galaxies,  they aren't moving either and NEVER did.   The redshift is from photons aging, ie, losing energy over time.    "Einstein’s theory that the speed of light in vacuum is independent of the motion of the source and the inertial reference frame of the observer has since been consistently confirmed by many experiments."   I am afraid that's wrong too.  AS the 3 dimensions ARE NOT independent of each other .   Normally x determines the valve of time for y and z.  If y or z determine the time we get a different time than for x.  And General Relativity is junk,  for about 10 reasons, but here are just two.  Every thing falls into a singularity.  And there are 100 other different theories on gravity,  99 must be wrong and if any were correct, there would only be one theory.  Did any of that change your mind ?  Any one else ?

(....this is gonna get good. Track Lola track !)

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dark-matter-could-be-found-in-rocks

Latest news from the world of desperate science to try and nail Dark Matter in rocks now which has been calculated to be 80% of the universe ,in that article, 85 % in wiki . Dark Energy has been calculated to make up 27% (wiki) with 5% being Barionic . For Energy ,Dark or otherwise to make up 27% of the Universe's MASS it would have to be absolutely insanely humungous . So much so that the universe should be so hot as to destroy all matter. Which is somewhat at odds with the near absolute zero temperature that we detect and this yoghurt in front of me...(cherry).

The Sun's Motion

Our Sun is just one star among several hundred billion others that together make up the Milky Way Galaxy. This is our immense "island of stars" and within it, each star is itself moving. Any planet orbiting a star will share its motion through the Galaxy with it. Stars, as we shall see, can be moving in a random way, just "milling about" in their neighborhoods, and also in organized ways, moving around the center of the Galaxy.

If we want to describe the motion of a star like our Sun among all the other stars, we run up against a problem. We usually define motion by comparing the moving object to something at rest. A car moves at 60 miles per hour relative to a reference post attached to the Earth, such as the highway sign, for example. But if all the stars in the Galaxy are moving, what could be the "reference post" to which we can compare its motion?

Andromeda Galaxy
The Sun travels with billions of other stars through the Milky Way Galaxy, which is thought to look much like the Andromeda Galaxy, pictured above.

Image credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC)

Astronomers define a local standard of rest in our section of the Galaxy by the average motion of all the stars in our neighborhood4. (Note that in using everyday words, such as "local" and "neighborhood", we do a disservice to the mind-boggling distances involved. Even the nearest star is over 25 thousand billion miles (40 thousand billion km) away. It's only that the Galaxy is so immense, that compared to its total size, the stars we use to define our Sun's motion do seem to be in the "neighborhood.")

Relative to the local standard of rest, our Sun and the Earth are moving at about 43,000 miles per hour (70,000 km/hr) roughly in the direction of the bright star Vega in the constellation of Lyra. This speed is not unusual for the stars around us and is our "milling around" speed in our suburban part of the Galaxy.

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Orbiting the Galaxy

In addition to the individual motions of the stars within it, the entire Galaxy is in spinning motion like an enormous pinwheel. Although the details of the Galaxy's spin are complicated (stars at different distances move at different speeds), we can focus on the speed of the Sun around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy5.

It takes our Sun approximately 225 million years to make the trip around our Galaxy. This is sometimes called our "galactic year". Since the Sun and the Earth first formed, about 20 galactic years have passed; we have been around the Galaxy 20 times. On the other hand, in all of recorded human history, we have barely moved in our long path around the Milky Way.

How fast do we have to move to make it around the Milky Way in one galactic year? It's a huge circle, and the speed with which the Sun has to move is an astounding 483,000 miles per hour (792,000 km/hr)! The Earth, anchored to the Sun by gravity, follows along at the same fantastic speed. (By the way, as fast as this speed is, it is still a long way from the speed limit of the universe—the speed of light. Light travels at the unimaginably fast pace of 670 million miles per hour or 1.09 billion km/hr.)

Moving through the CBR

What, you might be asking yourself, does all this have to do with how fast we are moving? Well, astronomers can now measure how fast the Earth is moving compared to this radiation filling all of space. (Technically, our motion causes one kind of Doppler Shift7 in the radiation we observe in the direction that we are moving and another in the direction opposite.)

Put another way, the CBR provides a "frame of reference" for the universe at large, relative to which we can measure our motion. From the motion we measure compared to the CBR, we need to subtract out the motion of the Earth around the Sun and the Sun around the center of the Milky Way. The motion that's left must be the particular motion of our Galaxy through the universe!

And how fast is the Milky Way Galaxy moving? The speed turns out to be an astounding 1.3 million miles per hour (2.1 million km/hr)! We are moving roughly in the direction on the sky that is defined by the constellations of Leo and Virgo. Although the reasons for this motion are not fully understood, astronomers believe that there is a huge concentration of matter in this direction. Some people call it The Great Attractor, although we now know that the pull is probably not due to one group of galaxies but many. Still the extra gravity in this direction pulls the Milky Way (and many neighbor galaxies) in that direction. 

https://astrosociety.org/edu/publications/tnl/71/howfast.html

RPaulB#4800
Thank you for your comments Titled Patzer. "How fast is the Milky Way Galaxy moving?" For our galaxy to move you need a reference point. What was yours ? IF the reference point is the center of the galaxy, we aren't moving. Maybe the earth is, once around the sun per year. "Galaxies at the outer fringes are "moving away from each other" faster than the speed of light as the space in the universe is expanding." Galaxies, they aren't moving either and NEVER did.

I suggest a refresher course of basic physics. 

To suggest- "Galaxies, they aren't moving either and NEVER did." and

"IF the reference point is the center of the galaxy, we aren't moving."

Is not Scientific.

Everything is moving - nothing lies in a state of total rest.

The speed of the Milky Way galaxy is not a single number, its value is relative to the speed of other objects. The reference for the Milky Way's motion is relative to the CBR.

Can two galaxies move away from each other faster than the speed of light? (Intermediate)
The short, and possibly surprising, answer to this question is yes.

The Hubble constant is the measure of how fast the Universe is expanding today and its value has been measured to be 70 km/s per Megaparsec (a parsec is just a unit of distance equal to about 3.26 light-years, and a Megaparsec is a million parsecs). This means that on average, for every Megaparsec two galaxies are separated by, they are moving away from each other by 70 km/s. Therefore, to be moving away from each other at the speed of light, two galaxies would need to be separated by a distance of about 4,300 million parsecs. This is smaller than the radius of the observable Universe, therefore not only are there galaxies in the Universe that are moving away from us faster than light, but we can still see them!

This raises two additional questions:

If another galaxy is moving away from us faster than light, how can we still see it?
Isn't it a violation of the theory of relativity to have two things moving apart faster than the speed of light?
The answer to the first of these questions is that the light the distant galaxy is emitting today will never reach us, so we will never know what it looks like today. This is because today it is moving away from us faster than light, so the light it emits doesn't travel fast enough to ever reach us. However, the light that it emitted billions of years ago, when the Universe was smaller (remember it has been expanding all along) and when that galaxy wasn't receding from the Milky Way as fast, is what we are seeing today. In other words, we are seeing that galaxy as it was billions of years ago.

The second question is an interesting one that confuses many people. The theory of relativity does indeed state that nothing can travel faster than light, however this refers to motion in the traditional sense, meaning you can't launch a spaceship and travel through space faster than light. The two galaxies we've been discussing are not travelling through space, it is the space between them that is expanding. Or put in another way, they are stationary and all the space around them is being stretched out. This is why it doesn't violate the theory of relativity, because it is not motion in the traditional sense.

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/physics/104-the-universe/cosmology-and-the-big-bang/expansion-of-the-universe/1066-can-two-galaxies-move-away-from-each-other-faster-than-light-intermediate

https://news.sky.com/story/mystery-of-dark-matter-may-have-been-solved-by-oxford-scientists-11572089

Oxford scientists solve the Dark Matter/Dark Energy mystery. It must be correct because their badges are bigger than other scientific institutions innit...Give them a Nobel Prize

If verified by repeated experimentation, they will receive the Nobel.

Give them oranges...I want to see how far I can take this