Why distant galaxies look young

The farther away galaxies are, the more they differ from nearby ones, and the difference is the same in every direction. Distant galaxies are on average smaller, bluer, quicker to form stars and poorer in elements heavier than helium. Bright quasars were most common at redshifts of 2 to 3, and the James Webb Space Telescope finds black holes that are very large for their galaxies at the greatest distances, though selection effects are still debated. Standard cosmology reads this as youth: looking far away means seeing light that left long ago, so every direction shows an earlier universe. RSI agrees that it is youth, and gives its own reading of why.

RSI separates two kinds of evidence. How big and how bright a distant galaxy looks depends on the journey its light makes. In RSI that light also bends along the tension gradients of the medium (Chapter VIII); any large-scale bending would change apparent sizes and total brightness, and with them the distances inferred from supernovae, so RSI must show that it is small enough to leave the distances of the breathing medium (Chapter XI) intact. Bending alone cannot change brightness per unit area, so the Tolman dimming is set by the breathing medium, not by bending. What a galaxy is made of is read from the ratios between its spectral lines, which nothing in the light's journey changes once the effect of dust is corrected. So the chemical trend is real: more redshifted galaxies really are chemically fresher, whatever redshift means.

RSI proposes that this reflects the trough of the medium's breathing (Chapter VI). Distant galaxies are seen as they were long ago, closer to the trough, when the rhythm of matter was slower and galaxies were young. RSI proposes that this young era was also one in which new knots formed faster than the Still Core removed them, while today the engine is ahead. Matter that unzips at the core returns to pure vibration, so newly formed matter starts as hydrogen and helium. Remnant black holes from before the trough, if any survive it, return no heavy elements to the gas around them, so young galaxies can gather around old black holes.

The pace of the cycle may be uneven. A lasting pattern of tension in the medium, or the averaged push of its standing waves, would gather matter into low-pressure regions, a possible origin for the cosmic web of filaments and voids. Matter reaching the Still Core in large clumps would make the engine flare and then go quiet, much as galactic black holes switch on and off as fuel arrives.

Light that rolls around the rim of the toroid could show the same galaxy twice, and no repeats have been seen. RSI's answer is that the rim may lie beyond the region whose light can reach us, and that light on so long a path would arrive too faint and too redshifted to detect easily.

Several questions remain open. The oldest dated stars are about 12 to 13 billion years old, and none is reliably older than about 13.5 billion years, even though the smallest stars can shine for trillions of years. RSI's answer is the trough: measured in atomic clocks, the rhythm of matter was lowest about 13.8 billion years ago, and stars count their ages in atomic ticks, so a star formed since the trough can be no older than about 13.8 billion years. RSI must still show that no star from the previous cycle survives the trough, even if black holes do. Because the breathing is felt everywhere at once, the trough is the same in every direction. RSI must also say what the medium was like at the trough. The trough era must produce the measured amounts of hydrogen, helium, deuterium and lithium, the bending must be shown to be small enough to leave the measured angular sizes and luminosities unchanged, and the history of the breathing must explain when the trends peak, such as the peak of star formation near a redshift of 2.