How much could gravitational binding energy act as hidden cosmic vacuum energy?

Abstract

Confronted with recent microwave background observations by WMAP and with puzzling supernovae locations in the magnitude - redshift m-z-diagram the present-day cosmology seems to call for cosmic vacuum energy as a necessary, unavoidable cosmological ingredient to get a rhyme for the disjunctive cosmological facts. Most often nowadays this vacuum energy is associated with Einstein‘s cosmological constant Λ or with the so-called: ”dark energy” paradigm, both of which are conceptually not well determined or physically clearly handable. Hereby, a positive value of Λ describes an inflationary action on cosmic scale dynamics which in view of recent cosmological data appears as an absolute need. In this article, however, we shall at least question the hypothesis of a constant vacuum energy density, since it is not justifyable on physical grounds and inconsistent with the energy conservation principle. Instead we show here that changes in gravitational binding energy of cosmic matter - connected with structure formation during the cosmic expansion -mathematically acts in a way very similar to vacuum energy, since it reduces the effective proper mass density and thus reduces the net cosmological gravitational attraction. Thus one may feel encouraged to believe that actions of cosmic vacuum energy, gravitational binding energy and effective mass reduction - taken by their pure cosmological effects - are closely related to each other, perhaps in some respects even have identical cosmological roots. Based on the results presented here we propose that the action of vacuum energy on cosmic spacetime dynamics inevitably leads to a decay of vacuum energy density. Connected with this decay is an increase of negative cosmic binding energy and the diminution of effective mass in the universe. If this all is adequately taken into account by the energy-momentum tensor of the GR field equations, one is then led to non-standard cosmologies which for the first time at least can guarantee the conservation of the total, global energy, both in static and expanding universes showing that the action of so-called vacuum energy is nothing else but the increase of gravitational binding energy in an evolved self-structured universe with a correlation coefficient of α ≥ 1. 5.