Black Holes Could Be the Amazing Force Expanding the Universe
From the ticking of clocks to the death of stars, it seems that everything is destined to eventually stop. But there is one very big thing that this doesn’t seem to work at all. It is the Universe itself, which is growing and expanding all the time.
According to our physical interpretation of how the universe should behave, that growth should be slow. Instead, measurements show that it is accelerating, driven by a mysterious force known as dark energy. And it’s dilly za it’s huge pickle.
But there’s something in the Universe that could explain it, some scientists argue: massive, dense, expanding bodies of matter we call black holes.
Astronomer Kevin Croker of Arizona State University says: “We can’t get the details of how this happens, but we can see evidence that it does.”
We don’t know what it is, but the calculations suggest that whatever is responsible for the accelerated expansion makes up 70 percent of the universe’s energy distribution.
What we see as growth today may not always be consistent.
According to modern theory, the first period of growth in the universe was a period of deflation. Shortly after the big bang, the Universe went from nothing to something enormous in a split second. It then grew slowly for a while, until about 5 billion years ago when the expansion was controlled by dark energy.
Whatever caused the Universe to expand, slow, and accelerate in the first place, it had to overcome the gravitational forces within the universe of things compressed into one place.
“If you ask yourself this question, ‘Where in the late Universe do we see gravity as strong as in the early Universe?’ the answer lies in the center of black holes,” explains physicist Gregory TarlĂ© of the University of Michigan.
“It’s possible that what happened during inflation is played out in reverse, the matter of a giant star becoming dark energy again during a gravitational collapse – just like the Big Bang played out in reverse.”
The idea that black holes can affect dark energy comes from a newly proposed concept called cosmological coupling, a proposal that comes out of attempts to solve the black hole problem with explanations of general relativity.
According to the theory, the extreme deviations of space associated with black holes are associated, or combined, with the expansion of the Universe. As the Universe expands, so do black holes; and as black holes grow, so does the Universe.
Last year, a team of researchers published a paper that proved the existence of a merging universe by studying supermassive black holes at the center of ‘dead’ galaxies. These are galaxies that have exhausted their fuel, to grow new stars, and feed the growth of the supermassive black hole.
Any growth shown by black holes in these galaxies cannot be attributed to normal growth processes, but to cosmic mergers. Finding signs of growth, the team felt their hypothesis had been confirmed.
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In a new paper, Croker and his colleagues have investigated the relationship between black holes and dark energy – not when a black hole is growing, but when it is born. They used the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to study the rate of formation of black holes from the center of the collapse of massive stars at the end of their lifetimes, much later in the lifetime of the Universe than when supermassive black holes are formed. was formed, and they compared this to the expansion of the Universe.
“These two things coincided – as new black holes were created in the death of massive stars, the amount of dark energy in the Universe increased accordingly,” says physicist Duncan Farrah of University of Hawai’i.
“This makes it more likely that black holes are the source of dark energy.”
According to the theory of cosmological coupling, black holes transform ordinary matter into dark energy. The team’s calculations not only produced an expansion rate for the Universe that is consistent with current measurements, but they provide an explanation for another problem: we haven’t been able to find all the normal things that should be in the Universe.
The rate of formation of black holes gives the rate of change of dark energy proportional to the number of missing objects.
This work offers solutions to several outstanding questions at once – pushing it to the top of the pile for explanations for the mysterious forces that drive the Universe.
“In fact, whether black holes are dark energy, combined with the universe they are in, is no longer a theoretical question,” TarlĂ© says. “This is a test question now.”
Research published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
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