As gravity causes the measure of space to collapse and this process sheds radiation, than wouldn't radiation play a major part in the expansion of space?
If space is infinite, therefore cannot expand locally, that this expansionary pressure would exert itself on gravitational systems. In other words, the rotational effect ascribed to dark energy, could just as well result from external pressure. This pressure could be expanding space in a non-expanding universe. Its source would be all the radiation being shed across the universe by all galaxies.
When light passes through gravitational fields, it is magnified by the well known lensing effect. I would propose that it is also blueshifted. As the light of more distant sources is more uniformly affected, than the redshift of these sources is reduced. The effect is that the redshift of closer sources is proportionally greater. Thus, from the Big Bang Model, the rate of expansion appears to be increasing, thus explaining the need for dark energy.
This from natureonline; In the "every little bit of information being used to pump the official version" category, I offer the following;
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Nature
Direct evidence found for dark energy
Mysterious force of cosmic acceleration marked Big Bang's afterglow.
23 July 2003
PHILIP BALL
Astronomers have found the first direct evidence that dark energy - a sort of push balancing gravity's pull - pervades the Universe.
Ryan Scranton of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and his colleagues have detected a fingerprint of dark energy in the afterglow of the Big Bang, radiation called the cosmic microwave background (CMB)1. The CMB is slightly hotter where there are more galaxies. Dark energy is the only explanation, the researchers argue.
Astrophysicists postulated dark energy when distant exploding stars, called supernovae, which were dimmer than expected, revealed that the Universe's expansion is perpetually gaining pace. But no one knows what dark energy is or where it comes from.
The new findings put it on firmer footing, being completely independent of the supernova observations. They show that dark energy influences the light particles, or photons, of the CMB, which radiate throughout space.
Well up
When a photon flies past a concentration of mass, such as a galaxy, it falls into a gravitational well, like a ball rolling downhill, and gains energy. As it climbs out of the well, the photon loses precisely the same amount of energy.
Or at least it would, if all it encountered were normal matter. But dark energy, being gravitationally repulsive, makes a gravitational well shallower as a photon passes through, so the photon exits with slightly more energy than it had when it entered.
This, Scranton and colleagues reason, makes the CMB hotter where there is more mass - where there are galaxies, in other words.
The researchers compared the new, detailed CMB temperature map from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite with the distribution of about 25 million galaxies measured by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, based at Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico.
There is one crucial assumption in this argument for dark energy: it presupposes that space is flat, on average, rather than curved. There are good empirical reasons to believe that this is the case.
