Ether, Luminosity and Galactic Source Counts

An interpretation of the cosmological redshift in terms of a cosmic ether is given. We study a Robertson-Walker cosmology in which the ether is phenomenologically defined by a homogeneous and isotropic permeability tensor. The speed of light becomes so a function of cosmic time like in a dielectric medium. However, the cosmic ether is dispersion free, it does not lead to a broadening of spectral lines. Locally, in Euclidean frames, the scale factors of the permeability tensor get absorbed in the fundamental constants. Mass and charge scale with cosmic time, and so do atomic energy levels. This substantially changes the interpretation of the cosmological redshift as a Doppler shift. Photon frequencies are independent of the expansion factor; their time scaling is determined by the permeability tensor. The impact of the ether on the luminosity-distance, on the distance-redshift relation, and on galactic number counts is discussed. The Hubble constant is related to the scale factors of the metric and the permeability tensor. We study the effects of the ether at first in comoving Robertson-Walker coordinates, and then, in the context of a flat but expanding space- time, in the globally geodesic rest frames of galactic observers. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.