Regarding this difficult matter of Dark Matter

BORING ALERT: For those of you who could care less about astrophysics or anything relating to the cosmos, just stop reading right now.

So I woke up this morning at around 1:30am with a possible solution to this whole "Accelerating Universe" thing. (For those of you unfamiliar with what I'm talking about see waaay below). So struck was I to find out if I was right, or more likely, totally wrong I wrote my thoughts to me personal Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. (If you currently don't have a favorite astrophysicist you should get one - I vote for Neil!)

I just sent it this morning so i don't expect a response right away but I'm excited to see if he has anything to say about it!

Here's my email to him:

Mr. Tyson,

I was thinking heavily on this mysterious problem of Dark Energy that seems to be accelerating our universe outward. At around 1:30am a possible explanation popped into my head. I'm sure this may have already been considered and, likely, found untrue.

I was reading a summary of Einstein's Theory of relativity when I came across a thought inducing sentence: "…space and time emerged from Einstein's reworking as malleable constructs whose form and appearance depend on one's state of motion."

This whole "appearance depending on one's state of motion" thing got me thinking. Perhaps the universe isn't actually speeding up but rather, we're slowing down? I'm not great at analogies but I'm going to give it a shot.

Think about two Yo-Yo's. One has a longer string than the other. That string could represent gravity, the longer the string, the weaker the gravity. The actual Yo-Yo represents a sphere of space (extended from the Universal Center) or a body of mass. If you release each Yo-Yo from it's starting point (Big Bang) the two would see themselves accelerating toward earth at the same rate. However, when the shorter yo-yo reaches the end of its string it begins to decelerate. If you were standing on the shorter yo-yo, it would appear as though the longer yo-yo were speeding away with a sudden boost in acceleration when in fact the observer has simply slowed.

I know it's not completely polished but it was something that made me think "What would Neil say?"

I would be honored with your thoughts on my amateur-ish Eureka moment!

Cheers!

Benito Segovia

On the topic of the accelerating universe: It's pretty commonly accepted that we all emerged from this Big Bang thing and ever since we've been rocketing away from the Universal core at approximately the same speed as everything else. Well, many wondered how long we could keep expanding until our own collective gravity slowed us down, eventually stopped us, and reversed the direction everything was moving.

Recent observations have found that instead of the universe grinding to a halt, it seems to be accelerating further outward. This has confounded physicists to a point of coming up with something called Dark Matter being held responsible for the massive amount of gravity required to power this kind of acceleration. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are now hotly debated and no proof of their existence yet exists.

Anyway, here's hoping he responds.