Alternative ideas in cosmology

TL;DR

This paper reviews various alternative cosmological theories, from variations of the Standard Model to more exotic models like static universes and tired-light hypotheses, highlighting their differences and current development status.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of alternative cosmological models, comparing their features and assessing their level of development relative to the standard Lambda-CDM model.

Findings

Standard model explains observations well but has unresolved issues.

Many alternative models lack the same level of explanatory power.

Most alternatives are less developed than Lambda-CDM.

Abstract

Some remarkable examples of alternative cosmological theories are reviewed here, ranging from a compilation of variations on the Standard Model through the more distant quasi-steady-state cosmology, plasma cosmology, or universe models as a hypersphere, to the most exotic cases including static models. The present-day standard model of cosmology, Lambda-CDM, gives us a representation of a cosmos whose dynamics is dominated by gravity with a finite lifetime, large scale homogeneity, expansion and a hot initial state, together with other dark elements necessary to avoid certain inconsistencies with observations. There are however some models with characteristics that are close to those of the standard model but differing in some minor aspects: different considerations on CP violation, inflation, number of neutrino species, quark-hadron phase transition, baryonic or non-baryonic dark-matter, dark energy, nucleosynthesis scenarios, large-scale structure formation scenarios; or major variations like a inhomogeneous universe, Cold Big Bang, varying physical constants or gravity law, zero-active mass (also called `R_h=ct'), Milne, and cyclical models. At the most extreme distance from the standard model, the static models, a non-cosmological redshift includes `tired-light' hypotheses, which assume that the photon loses energy owing to an intrinsic property or an interaction with matter or light as it travels some distance, or other non-standard ideas. Our impression is that none of the alternative models has acquired the same level of development as Lambda-CDM in offering explanations of available cosmological observations. One should not, however, judge any theory in terms of the number of observations that it can successfully explain (ad hoc in many cases) given the much lower level of development of the alternative ones.