Michele,

The inchworm is the light!

That’s why it’s redshifted! The space is supposedly expanding, as it crosses it.

Dark energy isn’t so much to explain the expansion of space, as that’s what the “Bang” is. Not to mention Inflation.

What the Dark Energy supposedly explains is the change in the rate of expansion. The sources at the edge of the visible universe appear to be receding at close to the speed of light, as that is closest to the initial bang. Yet the closer redshift is much less. The degree it increases with distance is called the Huddle Constant.

What they found is the rate decreases rapidly, then flattens out. If there was only the initial Bang, it wouldn’t explain how this slower, steadier rate came to be, rather than dropping off totally. So “Dark Energy” was proposed.

If it was an optical effect, on the other hand, what we see outwards, is the rate starts off slowly and compounds, eventually going parabolic.

Light from beyond this horizon line for visible light would be shifted off the visible spectrum and would appear as black body radiation, since it would be the entire spectrum, shifted below the infrared. Thus the cosmic background radiation.

Since the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to explore this radiation, my prediction will be that it finds it to be coming from infinite sources, scattered across the universe, not easily explained as a singular event.

Here is an interesting paper to consider;

h ttp://fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/2008CChristov_WaveMotion_45_154_EvolutionWavePackets.pdf

I put a gap between the h and the ttp, so it doesn’t all download. It still works though.