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TL;DR

The paper discusses the interpretation of cosmological redshift, emphasizing that it cannot be solely attributed to space expansion or Doppler effects, and highlights the importance of gravitational shifts in cosmology.

Contribution

It clarifies that cosmological redshift involves both Doppler and gravitational components, challenging the view that it is only due to space expansion.

Findings

Cosmological redshift is not purely Dopplerian.

Gravitational shifts play a significant role in redshift.

Decomposition of redshift into Doppler and gravitational parts is possible.

Abstract

In two recent papers, Abramowicz et al. claim that the expansion of the Universe can be interpreted only as the expansion of space. In fact, what they really prove is that the cosmological expansion cannot be described in terms of real motions in Minkowski spacetime. However, there is no controversy about this issue. Abramowicz et al. show that in general, the cosmological redshift is not a Doppler shift and they consider this fact as a proof that space expands. Again, nobody believes (perhaps except Milne) that for non-empty universes the origin of the redshift is purely Dopplerian. From the Principle of Equivalence it follows that there must be also a gravitational shift in presence of matter. Indeed, it is well known in cosmology that for small redshifts, the cosmological redshift can be decomposed into a Doppler component and a gravitational component. In a forthcoming paper, we shall perform such a decomposition for arbitrarily large values of the redshift.