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Consider two points A and B at rest with respect to each other. When you fire a photon from A to B, the photon obviously can reach B.

Now consider the same two points which, after the photon is fired, "move" away from each other with a velocity greater than the speed of light due to space expansion. If the expansion is constant, the two point move away from each other at an increasing "velocity".

Because the photon is "taken along" by the expansion it's always moving at c with respect to the expansion.

Is the trip for a photon from A to B, where A and B are at rest with respect to each other (no expansion), exactly the same as the trip from A to B when B recedes from A at v>c, no matter how great v? In other words, does the photon reach B at the same time as in the case of A and B are not moving away from each other due to the space expansion between A and B? Or to put it differently again, is the trip in expanding space just a scaled up version of the trip the photon makes from A to B when space isn't expanding?

Deschele Schilder
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1 Answers1

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Now consider the same two points which, after the photon is fired, "move" away from each other with a velocity greater than the speed of light due to space expansion.

This is not really something that can be answered as simply as you might imagine because the apparent velocity between A and B due to metric expansion will depend on their distance from each other. And, obviously, as time increases so will distance and therefore apparent velocity. But I will try to answer your question.

The time it takes for the photon to traverse the distance between A and B when space isn't expanding is the easy part. The photon moves at velocity $c$, so the time it takes is:

$$\Delta t = \frac{\Delta s}{c}$$

where $\Delta s$ is the distance between A and B.

Now comes the hard part. You can model 1-dimensional expansion with the following metric:

$$ds^2 = -c^2 dt^2 + a(t)^2 dx^2$$

where the function $a(t)$ is called the "scale factor." It is a function that varies depending on time and determines the distance between points. To model constant expansion over time, you can simply choose a scale factor whose rate of change is constant over time: $a(t) = kt$ for some constant $k$. This gives us the metric:

$$ds^2 = -c^2 dt^2 + k^2 t^2 dx^2$$

Light travels along null geodesics, i.e. where $ds^2=0$, so the differential equation governing the movement of light in this spacetime is:

$$\frac{dx}{dt} = \frac{c}{kt}$$

This equation is nice and simple, and separable:

$$\frac{k}{c} \int_{x_A}^{x_B} dx = \int_{t_A}^{t_B} \frac{dt}{t}$$

$$\frac{k}{c} (x_B - x_A) = \mathrm{ln} \left ( \frac{t_B}{t_A} \right )$$

which can be re-arranged into:

$$\Delta t = t_A \left [ \mathrm{exp} \left ( \frac{k \Delta x}{c} \right ) -1 \right ]$$

where $\Delta t = t_B - t_A$ is the time it takes the photon to reach point B after leaving A, and $\Delta x = x_B - x_A$ is the coordinate separation between A and B. The initial physical distance between A and B is found from the metric, and can be expressed as: $\Delta s = kt_A \Delta x$. Therefore the time it takes for a photon to traverse the distance $\Delta s$ between A and B, starting at time $t_A$, is given by:

$$\Delta t = t_A \left [ \mathrm{exp} \left ( \frac{\Delta s}{ct_A} \right ) -1 \right ]$$

As you can tell, this is a bit more complicated than the equation in the first scenario. It depends not only on the initial distance between A and B, but also on the time when the photon is released. This should make some sense because the size of this universe depends on time. The moment $t=0$ represents the "big bang" of this universe where the physical distance between all points is zero. So the time it takes for the photon to make the journey depends on how long after the big bang you conduct the experiment. You will find, however, that if you try to solve for a time $t_A$ to start the experiment so that the result is the same as the non-expanding trip time, there is no solution. This means that the trip time will never be the same in the expanding universe as it is in the non-expanding universe, no matter when you try to run the experiment.

(As a side note, it's also interesting to notice that $\Delta t$ in the expanding universe does not depend on the rate of expansion, i.e. $k$.)

The apparent velocity between A and B is given by:

$$v_r = \left ( \frac{\dot{a}}{a} \right ) \Delta s = \frac{\Delta s}{t}$$

Plugging this in gives:

$$\Delta t = t_A \left [ \mathrm{exp} \left ( \frac{v_r}{c} \right ) -1 \right ]$$

The trip time therefore exponentially increases with $v_r$. Hopefully this answers your question!

Jold
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